Re: Is there a way to force here-documents/strings to use temporary files?

[Chet Ramey]

On 12/20/20 2:25 AM, Oğuz wrote:

> So, is there any way to force here-documents to use temporary files no
> matter how long the expanded document is? If not, it would be nice if
> compat50 had this effect.

There is not. I'm not sure that a compat setting would be appropriate for
something that is purely an implementation issue.

There was a fairly extensive discussion that preceded this change, starting
with

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2019-03/msg00073.html

and continuing the next month (!) with

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2019-04/msg00007.html

One can argue that the concerns on either side (seeking on stdin vs.
assuming that here-strings will never hit the file system) are assumptions
that should not be made, for instance

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2019-03/msg00075.html
or
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2019-03/msg00082.html

I decided ultimately to make the change for the most common cases, where
the amount of data passed in a here string or here document is small. But
that is simply an implementation detail; the documented semantics of here-
documents and here-strings aren't changed.

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