Re: Documentation issue

[Eli Barzilay]

Pierre Gaston:
> I think it's even more likely to happen with eg: read array[i]

Maybe, but see below.

> There is a large number of pitfalls in bash
> (http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls) that most people ignore.

And it doesn't even mention the unset problem, I think.


On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:56 AM, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> On 10/26/17 1:18 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>> Bash surprised me with the behavior mentioned here:
>>
>>     https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15897473
>>
>> This can be pretty bad in that it's very unexpected (see the
>> comments).
>
> I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Pathname expansion (globbing) is
> one of the word expansions performed before a simple command is
> executed. The `unset' builtin is no different.

The last sentence is showing why it's a surprise: it is confusing since
it easy to think that unset is special, similar to languages which have
something like `delete foo[1]` where the thing that follows delete is an
lvalue.


>> The thing is that AFAICT, there is no mention of this pitfall in the
>> man page...
>
> "The  unset  builtin  is  used to destroy arrays.  unset name[subscript]
> destroys the array element at index subscript.  Negative subscripts  to
> indexed  arrays are interpreted as described above.  Care must be taken
> to avoid unwanted side effects caused  by  pathname  expansion."

1. This is much more indirect than a simple "always quote array
   references";

2. I completely missed it since it's not in the place which describes
   unset.

(BTW, when I did dare for the first time to use unset on an array I did
go through the unset description, and got a vague impression that it's
kind of doing the special lvalue thing, so possibly the indirect warning
would have been sufficient to slap me back into the bash reality.)

-- 
                   ((x=>x(x))(x=>x(x)))                  Eli Barzilay:
                   http://barzilay.org/                  Maze is Life!