Re: Corrupted multibyte characters in command substitutions

[Frank Heckenbach]

Chet Ramey wrote:

> On 1/1/22 7:02 PM, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
>
> Thanks for the report. This is a pretty good in-depth analysis of the issue.
> 
> This was fixed back in March, 2021 in the devel branch as a result of
> https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?10035 (though the fix is different from
> yours).
> 
> It's queued up as one of the next set of bash-5.1 patches.

I'm not happy with the way this bug is handled.

After all, we're talking about silent data corruption, and now I
learn the bug is known for almost a year, the fix is known and still
hasn't been released, not even as an official patch.

In the meantime, the buggy version has made it into a Debian stable
release (and I assume many other distributions) and caused me (and I
assume many other users) a lot of trouble.

I spend many hours, first debugging my own script, then bash, which
could have been spent more productively! I'll now have to spend more
time installing a patched bash on each system I've upgraded since
then.

Also, any data that were processed by a bash script are now
potentially corrupt, with no easy way of checking!

PS: I still think my patch is better as it addresses the root cause
instead of leaving a minefield for the next one to make a change
there, but anyway, at least get either patch out now ASAP, please!

Frank