Chet: My apologies in advance for not responding in thread. The bug-bash archive interface doesn't expose the "Message-ID" header anywhere I can find, and I am not a subscriber. I suppose I should become one. :)
> I believe I'd rather have variables behave as they're documented. It's more > predictable. Is it? The whole point of a standard like POSIX is that I should be able to write my code in accordance with the standard and have it run on compliant systems that I may not even be aware of or that might not have been developed yet. The standard determines what is "predictable" behavior, not the Bash documentation. > That's one of the problems here: the author never intended this script to > run in any shell other that Debian's dash. If they had, maybe they would > have tested it on other shells, even other shells that Debian includes. The author intended for portability and POSIX compliance. Otherwise, the script header would not have read "#! /bin/sh". It runs as expected on dash and ksh. POSIX is supposed to enable portability. Compliant code should run the same on any compliant interpreter or compiler. How can I possibly test on all systems that try to be compliant? I may not be aware of all of them or one may not even exist yet. Requiring someone to test on all possible current and future shells that claim POSIX-compliance defeats the purpose of a reference. As an aside: I believe in thorough testing in as many environments as feasible! > Even then (using either solution), what does a script do if it wants to > be invoked as: > > GROUPS='abelian ...' script [options] > > ? > > That case works, see above. Maybe it shouldn't, but it does. This doesn't work unless it was recently fixed. A variation does... bash-5.0$ echo $BASH_VERSION 5.0.17(1)-release bash-5.0$ GROUPS=FOO bash -c 'echo $GROUPS' 1000 bash-5.0$ GROUPS=FOO bash --posix -c 'echo $GROUPS' 1000 bash-5.0$ env GROUPS=FOO bash -c 'echo $GROUPS' FOO bash-5.0$ env GROUPS=FOO bash --posix -c 'echo $GROUPS' FOO The same is the case for UID... bash-5.0$ UID=x bash -c 'echo $UID' bash: UID: readonly variable 1000 I could be wrong here if this was recently fixed. > It could have, but I'm not seeing a good enough reason to change it > 25-30 years in. I think the result is that this report will surface at regular intervals for decades to come. -- Jason Franklin
