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Re: Problem with if [ -d in bash 4.3.30


From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: Problem with if [ -d in bash 4.3.30
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 07:14:16 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.3.0

On 12/09/2014 06:24 AM, Olivier TROCHERIE wrote:
> With bash 3.2, when I run the following commands:
> 
> if [ -d ${VAR:=""} ]

Insufficient quoting.  You are executing:

[ -d ]

which is a test whether the single argument "-d" is not empty (which is
true), ergo the exit 0 status.

You MEANT to use:

[ -d "${VAR:=""}" ]

which would evaluate to:

[ -d "" ]

and correctly return status 1, because the empty string "" is not a
directory.

> I get the no answer ("" is not a directory: correct behaviour).

No, with bash 3.2, you are tripping up on a parser bug. Bash 3.2
incorrectly handled double quotes inside unquoted parameter expansion.

> 
> If I run the same commands with bash 4.3.30, I get the yes answer, which 
> seems to be a bad behavior.

No, you get the correct behavior.  Newer bash fixed the parser bug to
comply with POSIX.

For comparison, try:

$ echo . ${VAR:=""} .
. .
$ echo . "${VAR:=""}" .
.  .

in modern bash, you can see the difference when the parser is behaving
correctly.

> Would it be possible to fix this issue?

Yes, since the issue is in your script, you can fix your script.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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