Re: Bash manual - interactive shell definition

[Ken Irving]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:57:41AM +0200, Pierre Gaston wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Ken Irving <ken.irving@alaska.edu> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 09:16:05AM +0000, Marc Herbert wrote:
> > > >> Could this sentence:
> > > >>
> > > >> "An interactive shell is one started without non-option arguments,
> > > >> unless -sis specified, without specifying the
> > > >> -c option, and whose input and error output are both connected to
> > terminals
> > > >> (as determined by isatty(3)), or one started with the -i option. "
> > > >>
> > > >> be any more confusing?
> > > >
> > > > Is seems pretty clearly stated to me.
> > >
> > > Please enlighten us with the priority of English boolean operators.
> > >
> > > I have never seen a natural language sentence with so many boolean
> > operators.
> >
> > Well I can try.
> >
> >    An interactive shell is one started without non-option arguments,
> >
> > If there are any arguments then they must be options...
> >
> >    unless -s is specified,
> >
> > bash(1) says: "If the -s option is present ... then commands are read
> > from the standard input", which clearly is not interactive.
> >
> 
> If you run "bash -s foo bar" in a terminal it starts an interactive shell.

Maybe the definition isn't correct, then, if your example is at odds
with the first two statements.  The -s is accompanied by foo, and bar
is a non-option argument.    I would think that 'foo' would executed as
a command, and the the file bar would be run as a script; I don't see 
how this would be interactive, though.

Ken