On 2021-12-13 at 11:23 +0000, Kerin Millar wrote: > You mentioned being confused by how the and's and or's combine. The > wording of the bash man page seems marginally less ambiguous in that > regard, partly owing to its sparse use of the comma. > > "An interactive shell is one started without non-option arguments > (unless -s is specified) and without the -c option whose standard > input and error are both connected to terminals (as determined by > isatty(3)), or one started with the -i option." > > Although, I would say that the absence of a comma before whose is a > grammatical error. In any case, I wanted to suggest the use of the > word, either. For example:- > > "An interactive shell is either one started without non-option > arguments (unless -s is specified) and without the -c option whose > standard input and error are both connected to terminals (as > determined by isatty(3)), or one started with the -i option." > > I think that the addition of this word might increase the probability > of the sentence being (correctly) interpreted in the fashion of "an > interactive shell is either one that fulfils ( criteria A ) or ( > criteria B )", keeping in mind that the -i option always renders bash > interactive.
I think it is much simpler than what the existing definition (and the mentioned proposals) do by describing non-option arguments, and those two options. It all boils down to "bash doesn't have anything to run" Thus I propose: «An interactive shell is one which was provided no command to run (neither by directly receiving a file after all options and their arguments nor by use of -c or -s options) and whose standard input and error are both connected to terminals (as determined by isatty(3)), or one explicitly started with the -i option.» Regards
