Fwd: for VAR; do does not work any more on some platforms

[Eric Blake]

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Bash 3.1 currently violates POSIX in that 'for V ; ...' does not behave
like 'for V in "$@" ; ...'.  As evidenced from this snippet of a report on
bug-bash, it affects autoconf.  Should we document this in shell
limitations, and work around it, or just assume that a patch to bash 3.1
will be available soon?

==========
- -------- Original Message --------
Subject: for VAR; do does not work any more on some platforms
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 11:20:23 +0000
From: bashbugreport-ta AT durchnull.de
To: bug-bash AT gnu.org

Bash Version: 3.1
Patch Level: 11
Release Status: release

Description:

In other shells (like bash 3.0, bash 2.x, zsh, dash),

    for VARIABLE; do ...; done

is equivalent to

    for VARIABLE in "$@"; do ...; done

GNU autoconf also relies on this fact at many points:

    ac_prev=
    for ac_option
    do
      # If the previous option needs an argument, assign it.
      if test -n "$ac_prev"; then
        eval "$ac_prev=\$ac_option"
        ac_prev=
        continue
      fi

      ac_optarg=`expr "x$ac_option" : 'x[^=]*=\(.*\)'`

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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