Re: Severe IFS glob bug needs patch [was: Setting IFS='*' causes bash to freeze on tab completion]

[Martijn Dekker]

Op 04-11-16 om 01:27 schreef Eduardo Bustamante:
> I agree with everything, except calling it severe. This is
> self-inflicted harm, and easy to work around

It is not self-inflicted. The behaviour is a bug in bash. The user did
nothing to cause that bug.

Even if you think it's somehow reasonable to expect bash users to be
aware of this bug while using or coding for bash (though the bug has not
been publicised anywhere), bash is supposed to be a POSIX shell, and
POSIX is supposed to be a standard. You cannot assume that the code bash
executes is written with bash bugs in mind.

It is also not "easy" to work around. If your program for any reason
needs to split strings on any of the characters ?, *, [ and ], and uses
field splitting to achieve this (which in POSIX is the canonical
method), you will now need to program a workaround with something like
sed or parameter substitutions. Unless, of course, the easy workaround
is to simply use another shell.

Another big issue is that third-party library functions need to work for
arbitrary values of IFS. This bug makes that impossible for bash.

For instance, if you recall, the original bug reporter wanted to split
some string by "*" on an interactive shell. This caused a freeze upon
using auto-completion because the bash-completion package broke as a
result. Chet initially blamed it on bash-completion, but in fact the
fault was with bash itself. The resulting breakage was clearly severe.

- M.