Re: Assigning to BASHPID fails silently

[Eduardo A . Bustamante López]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 11:53:37PM +0200, Martijn Dekker wrote:
[...]
> Assigning to BASHPID most certainly does have an effect. Since you
> didn't quote that part, I think you might have missed my point that
> attempting this will silently exit the shell without any error message,
> causing the problem to be hard to track down. This is different from
> GROUPS and FUNCNAME, where the shell silently continues (causing the
> problem to be hard to track down in a completely different way -- if
> anything, that's worse!).

I think he did get your point. There's definitely a bug here. It should be
either:

1. BASHPID is readonly, therefore assignment to it is fatal and the script exits
(with an error message printed). That's what my previous patch did.

2. BASHPID is not read-only, but changes to it are discarded (with the null
assignement function). Assignments to BASHPID are non-fatal, and it's possible
to unset it. Once it's unset, it's magical meaning is lost. (I think this is
what Chet is proposing). noro_bashpid.patch

> In what possible context would assigning to any of these variables make
> sense, or be an indication of anything other than a fatal bug in the
> script? I think they should all be readonly, and produce a proper
> diagnostic error message upon exit if assigning is attempted.
[...]

I wonder the same thing. I don't understand the reasoning for picking (2).

-- 
Eduardo Bustamante
https://dualbus.me/

noro_bashpid.patch
Description: Text document