Hi, This report stems from the discussion at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-bash/2024-02/msg00085.html.
Consider the following two cases. $ ( set a -- b; f=+ IFS=$f; [[ $f$*$f == *"$f--$f"* ]]; echo $? ) 0 $ ( set a -- b; f=$'\1' IFS=$f; [[ $f$*$f == *"$f--$f"* ]]; echo $? ) 1 It does not make sense that that the exit status value differs between these cases, especially since SOH is not a whitespace character (in the sense of field splitting). I think that the second case should also yield 0. Regardless of what the intended behaviour is, I would also expect for the manual to describe it. Note that quoting the left-hand side fixes it for SOH. In the absence of quotes, xtrace output suggests that all of the SOH characters are stripped from the expansion of $f$*$f. $ ( set a -- b; f=$'\1' IFS=$f; [[ "$f$*$f" == *"$f--$f"* ]]; echo $? ) 0 -- Kerin Millar
