Re: Unclosed quotes on heredoc mode

[Chet Ramey]

On 11/17/21 3:02 PM, Robert Elz wrote:

>   | bash-5.1$ cat << $PATH
> 
> 
>   | it should have terminated with the upper delimiter!
> 
> What do you consider the "upper delimiter" ?
> 
> This is one of the weirder aspects of shell syntax, and perhaps one
> of bash's oddities.

It's not. Every modern shell uses `$PATH' as the here-document delimiter
and checks for the delimiter before any part of the process that expands
the lines in the here-document body.

> First, the EOF should not work, that's a bash bug (IMO) - that should
> generate an error, not just a warning.

It's not. The historical shells used for the basis of the POSIX standard
(ksh88 and the SVR4 sh) silently allow EOF to terminate a here-document;
ksh93 preserves this behavior. Some of the common shells allow this as
well (e.g., dash, zsh and the version of the FreeBSD from a couple of years
ago when I last built it), some do not (e.g., mksh and the netbsd sh). Bash
at least warns you about it.

> 
>  Example:
>   |
>   | bash-5.1$
>   | bash-5.1$ cat << ola"
> 
> OK, here we have another of the oddities of shell syntax.   The spec
> says that a here document starts at the next newline after the << operator,
> but that's not what it really means. 

I think the intent there is that the here document starts at the next
newline after the delimiter.


> Being able to do that (include embedded newline characters
> in a "line") isn't required by the shell specification, and (it has been
> a while since I checked) I do not believe that those work in bash (they
> do in some other shells).

I couldn't fine one where it does.


> Since bash doesn't allow end delimiter words that contain newlines to
> work, it should probably generate an error when you try to use one, that
> would have made things clear.

See above.


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