Clint Adams wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 10:31:12PM -0600, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> No, only the former.
>
> And what is the syntactic significance of the distinction there?
Sorry, that was cryptic of me.
The grammar of shell command language is defined in [1]. It says:
for_clause : For name linebreak do_group
| For name linebreak in sequential_sep do_group
| For name linebreak in wordlist sequential_sep do_group
;
linebreak : newline_list
| /* empty */
sequential_sep : ';' linebreak
| newline_list
;
News to me, but it looks to me like the following is valid:
for i
in foo bar baz
do echo hi
done
and the following is not:
for i; in foo bar baz
do echo hi
done
2.10.2.6 says the same: all that is allowed between the second word of
a "for" command and the "in" or "do" keyword is a sequence of newlines.
The system 7 bourne shell indeed does not tolerate a ';' before 'do'.
The original ash requires a ';' or newline.
Upshot: while the maximally portable syntax is
for i
do ...
POSIX also allows
for i do ...
and not
for i; do ...
[1]
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_10
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