Re: Positional parameter & array slicing bug with empty arguments

[Theodoros V. Kalamatianos]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 07:14:09PM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote:
> > It seems to me that the bug patch 032 addresses is slightly less 
> > troubling than having arrays break out of the blue.
>
> Let's rein in the hyperbole.

Reading my post again, I realized that it might have come across as 
being sarcastic, which was not my intention. I have often dealt with 
scripts that stuff anything bar $'\0' in variables and arrays. And I 
will admit that I have occasionally used $'\x01' to $'\x07' as markers 
myself (yes, definitely not ideal...).

Therefore, issues with so-called special characters not being handled 
correctly are not trivial for me and indeed only slightly less troubling 
than arrays breaking.

> Bash uses DEL as an internal marker character during word expansion, so 
> problems involving DEL are a higher priority than you might think.

Does that mean that DEL should not be entered in variables and such, or 
is that something that just affects the internals of Bash?

> I apologize for not testing the corner case you ran
> across, but it's been 18 months since the patch was released and yours is
> the first report of problems with it, so it doesn't seem to have affected
> many people.

Probably because most sane people would have turned to a more "proper" 
programming language, such as Perl or Python, before coming even close 
to what I've been doing with Bash. I probably should too, except for the 
fact that I am targeting environments where a shell may be all that is 
available...

> I am working on getting bash-4.3 out the door before I think about
> releasing additional patches to bash-4.2.

Nice! I look forward to it...

> I have appended something you
> can apply -- your line numbers will certainly vary -- to get you past the
> problem you're currently having.

Thanks for the patch, although I will probably stick with my current 
work-around that avoids empty elements altogether. It seems to make a 
couple of other things a bit simpler in my code too, so...

> Chet

Best regards,

Theodoros