Re: Non-expanding here-documents inside command substitution are subject to newline joining

[Chet Ramey]

On 2/11/17 12:11 AM, Michael Homer wrote:

> If the same command is put inside command substitution instead, Bash (and 
> pdksh) behaves differently than the others, and performs newline joining to 
> have a single line in the middle “def ghi”. Given
>     x=$(cat <<'EOT'
>     abc
>     def \
>     ghi
>     jkl
>     EOT
>     )
> In Bash, x now contains:
>     abc\ndef ghi\njkl

Thanks for the report.  This is a bug in bash's command substitution parsing.

> POSIX isn’t perfectly unambiguous here, but my intuition reading it is 
> consistent with everyone else’s behaviour rather than Bash’s. The relevant 
> parts of the specification I could find and more detail are given in 
> <http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/340923/73093>, and the original motivating 
> example was from someone trying to produce ASCII art inside command 
> substitution in an earlier question 
> <http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/340718/73093>.

It is not necessarily ambiguous, but it does require close reading.

> Geir Hauge in the comments of the question provided this patch to parse.y 
> purporting to solve the issue: <http://sprunge.us/ZMAT>. 

That's a good fix.

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