the documentation shows that for <<< here documents, the word must be right
after the operator (although it doesnt really spell it out). not sure if that
should be made explicit and to have bash reject it, or to fix up this issue so
it works again ...
at any rate, this style usage, while seemingly not allowed by the docs, works
fine with older/current bash:
echo $(cat <<< "foo")
however, when we go multiline, bash-4.0 gets into a parsing loop:
$ cat test.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo $(
cat <<< "foo"
)
$ ./test.sh
./test.sh: line 2: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `)'
./test.sh: line 5: syntax error: unexpected end of file
if we go ahead and remove that whitespace after the <<<, then it works fine:
$ cat test.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo $(
cat <<<"foo"
)
$ ./test.sh
foo
the trouble is that when people write code, they often try to inject
whitespace to make it readable. that means using a space between the <<<
operator and the string they feed it is common from what i can see.
-mike
