Re: bash doesn't act like mksh at all

[Chet Ramey]

On 2/28/11 6:45 AM, Andres Perera wrote:
> for i in bash mksh; do
>     echo $i:
>     $i <<'!'
>         set 'a  b' 'c  d'
>         quoted="$@"
>         unquoted=$@
>         echo "$quoted"
>         echo "$unquoted"
>     !
> done
> 
> here bash treats unquoted $@ on rhs differently, expanding it like $*:
> 
> bash:
> a  b c  d
> a b c d
> mksh:
> a  b c  d
> a  b c  d
> 
> persists after turning on posix-compat mode:
> 
> bash -o posix -c 'set "a   b" "c   d"; unquoted=$@; echo "$unquoted"'
> a b c d
> 
> 
> the shell is treating $@ and "$@" like special tokens in assignments,
> which is wrong

Thanks for the report.  The shell is inappropriately splitting the
unquoted $@ when it appeared on the rhs of an assignment statement.  This
will certainly be fixed for the next version, and may appear as a
patch to bash-4.2.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/