Re: sh portability questions

[Akim Demaille]

>>> "Paul" == Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

 > "local" isn't in POSIX so I'd avoid it in portable scripts.

Doh.  Thanks.


 > For what it's worth, I briefly searched for this issue and found these
 > bug reports dated this year where someone used "local" in a shell
 > script and someone else complained and fixed it.

 > http://www.networksecurityarchive.org/html/Secure-Shell/2005-02/msg00067.html
 > http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/x/xfree86/xfree86_4.3.0.dfsg.1-14/changelog

Thanks, I should have done this myself...

 > Is "local" that crucial?  Admittedly it's very annoying to lack local
 > variables, but you can always solve it by renaming.  (Unless you want
 > to use recursion.  Is that a goal here?)

No, recursion is not an issue, but it was to avoid having to stick to
ugly naming convention to avoid clashes.

 > Assuming you don't need recursion, here's a thought.

Nice trick!  Thanks for the suggestion.  Unfortunately, although I
don't have recursion, I do call my function multiple times.  Of course
I could start using 'unset', which is unportable but easy to work
around, but that starts to become quite a mess.

I can actually define "local" to do nothing and use an external
maintainer-check to grep'n check them.

Also, maybe I am paranoid, but would you trust shells to support
conditional function definitions?  Or function definitions in eval?

if (local foo) >/dev/null 2>&1; then :; else
  local () { true;  }
fi

or even

(local foo) >/dev/null 2>&1 || local () { true; }


Bah.  First trust, then react.  Thanks!