address@hidden (Re: indirection as an lvalue)

[Bob Proulx]

Bill Gradwohl wrote:
> BTW - I ran thru the archives via a search for 'indirection' and for the
> longest time was confused by references to address@hidden scattered
> throughout the code examples. Here's an example:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2002-11/msg00085.html
> 
> I did a man bash looking for address@hidden thinking its some new
> facility I was unaware of. Made me feel pretty silly afterwards 8-)
> 
> What is that supposed to be? The references presented by the search were
> largely unusable because of it.

This is caused by misguided attempts to hide email addresses in order
to avoid spammers being able to harvest them.  Some people complain
loudly if they see their email address on the web.  I think that is
silly since it is impossible to hide email addresses.  A secret
between you and several hundred (or thousand) other recipients on a
public mailing list is not a secret.  Hiding is not practically
possible.

But because of this issue hacks have made to web archive display code
to avoid displaying email addresses.  You are seeing one such broken
attempt at appeasement.  The web archive display code on lists.gnu.org
munges what it thinks are email addresses in order to prevent
harvesting by spammers.

You might find this representation of that message more readable.

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.shells.bash.bugs/1728/focus=1729

Bob