Re: Incorrect alias expansion within command substitution

[L A Walsh]

On 2022/02/01 07:50, Chet Ramey wrote:
> "Historically some shells used simple parenthesis counting to find the
> terminating ')' and therefore did not account for aliases. However, such
> shells never conformed to POSIX, which has always required recursive
> parsing (see XCU 2.3 item 5)."
>   
----
   It doesn't require recursive parsing if the aliases declared
in the parent shell are expanded in the child shell -- i.e. if
bash followed the posix requirement that alias expansion default to
on, then the aliases in the BASH_ALIASES data structure would
automatically be imported into the child shell and expanded and this
type of complicated parsing problem wouldn't occur.  It seems
like the reason this error is occurring, is because someone is trying to
work around bash's incompatibility with the posix standard by not starting
with aliases turned on by default.


> So this seems like behavior that should be conditional on posix mode to
> preserve backwards compatibility.
>   
You mean continue to to create workaround(s) for bash's non-conformance
w/r/to initial alias expansion.

Why not nip the problem at the source -- make bash posix conformant by 
starting
w/alias expansion turned on?

In the long run it will prove simpler and provide
compatibility with existing posix-compliant shells.