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Contrary to a persistent urban legend, the Bourne shell does not
systematically split variables and back-quoted expressions, in particular
on the right-hand side of assignments and in the argument of case.
For instance, the following code:
case "$given_srcdir" in
.) top_srcdir="`echo "$dots" | sed 's,/$,,'`" ;;
*) top_srcdir="$dots$given_srcdir" ;;
esac
is more readable when written as:
case $given_srcdir in
.) top_srcdir=`echo "$dots" | sed 's,/$,,'` ;;
*) top_srcdir=$dots$given_srcdir ;;
esac
and in fact it is even more portable: in the first case of the
first attempt, the computation of top_srcdir is not portable,
since not all shells properly understand "`..."..."...`".
Worse yet, not all shells understand "`...\"...\"...`"
the same way. There is just no portable way to use double-quoted
strings inside double-quoted back-quoted expressions (pfew!).
$@The traditional way to work around this portability problem is to use ‘${1+"$@"}’. Unfortunately this method does not work with Zsh (3.x and 4.x), which is used on Mac OS X. When emulating the Bourne shell, Zsh performs word splitting on ‘${1+"$@"}’:
zsh $ emulate sh
zsh $ for i in "$@"; do echo $i; done
Hello World
!
zsh $ for i in ${1+"$@"}; do echo $i; done
Hello
World
!
Zsh handles plain ‘"$@"’ properly, but we can't use plain ‘"$@"’ because of the portability problems mentioned above. One workaround relies on Zsh's “global aliases” to convert ‘${1+"$@"}’ into ‘"$@"’ by itself:
test "${ZSH_VERSION+set}" = set && alias -g '${1+"$@"}'='"$@"'
A more conservative workaround is to avoid ‘"$@"’ if it is possible that there may be no positional arguments. For example, instead of:
cat conftest.c "$@"
you can use this instead:
case $# in
0) cat conftest.c;;
*) cat conftest.c "$@";;
esac
Autoconf macros often use the set command to update
‘$@’, so if you are writing shell code intended for
configure you should not assume that the value of ‘$@’
persists for any length of time.
${10}shift. The 7th Edition shell reported an error if given
${10}, and
Solaris 10 /bin/sh still acts that way:
$ set 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
$ echo ${10}
bad substitution
${var:-value}sh, don't accept the
colon for any shell substitution, and complain and die.
${var=literal} : ${var='Some words'}
otherwise some shells, such as on Digital Unix V 5.0, die because of a “bad substitution”.
Solaris /bin/sh has a frightening bug in its interpretation
of this. Imagine you need set a variable to a string containing
‘}’. This ‘}’ character confuses Solaris /bin/sh
when the affected variable was already set. This bug can be exercised
by running:
$ unset foo
$ foo=${foo='}'}
$ echo $foo
}
$ foo=${foo='}' # no error; this hints to what the bug is
$ echo $foo
}
$ foo=${foo='}'}
$ echo $foo
}}
^ ugh!
It seems that ‘}’ is interpreted as matching ‘${’, even
though it is enclosed in single quotes. The problem doesn't happen
using double quotes.
${var=expanded-value} default="yu,yaa"
: ${var="$default"}
sets var to ‘M-yM-uM-,M-yM-aM-a’, i.e., the 8th bit of each char is set. You don't observe the phenomenon using a simple ‘echo $var’ since apparently the shell resets the 8th bit when it expands $var. Here are two means to make this shell confess its sins:
$ cat -v <<EOF
$var
EOF
and
$ set | grep '^var=' | cat -v
One classic incarnation of this bug is:
default="a b c"
: ${list="$default"}
for c in $list; do
echo $c
done
You'll get ‘a b c’ on a single line. Why? Because there are no spaces in ‘$list’: there are ‘M- ’, i.e., spaces with the 8th bit set, hence no IFS splitting is performed!!!
One piece of good news is that Ultrix works fine with ‘: ${list=$default}’; i.e., if you don't quote. The bad news is then that QNX 4.25 then sets list to the last item of default!
The portable way out consists in using a double assignment, to switch the 8th bit twice on Ultrix:
list=${list="$default"}
...but beware of the ‘}’ bug from Solaris (see above). For safety, use:
test "${var+set}" = set || var={value}
`commands`While in general it makes no sense, do not substitute a single builtin with side effects, because Ash 0.2, trying to optimize, does not fork a subshell to perform the command.
For instance, if you wanted to check that cd is silent, do not use ‘test -z "`cd /`"’ because the following can happen:
$ pwd
/tmp
$ test -z "`cd /`" && pwd
/
The result of ‘foo=`exit 1`’ is left as an exercise to the reader.
The MSYS shell leaves a stray byte in the expansion of a double-quoted command substitution of a native program, if the end of the substution is not aligned with the end of the double quote. This may be worked around by inserting another pair of quotes:
$ echo "`printf 'foo\r\n'` bar" > broken
$ echo "`printf 'foo\r\n'`"" bar" | cmp - broken
- broken differ: char 4, line 1
$(commands)`commands`.
This construct can be nested while this is impossible to do portably with back quotes. Unfortunately it is not yet universally supported. Most notably, even recent releases of Solaris don't support it:
$ showrev -c /bin/sh | grep version
Command version: SunOS 5.10 Generic 121004-01 Oct 2005
$ echo $(echo blah)
syntax error: `(' unexpected
nor does irix 6.5's Bourne shell:
$ uname -a
IRIX firebird-image 6.5 07151432 IP22
$ echo $(echo blah)
$(echo blah)
If you do use ‘$(commands)’, make sure that the commands do not start with a parenthesis, as that would cause confusion with a different notation ‘$((expression))’ that in modern shells is an arithmetic expression not a command. To avoid the confusion, insert a space between the two opening parentheses.
Avoid commands that contain unbalanced parentheses in here-documents, comments, or case statement patterns, as many shells mishandle them. For example, Bash 3.1, ‘ksh88’, pdksh 5.2.14, and Zsh 4.2.6 all mishandle the following valid command:
echo $(case x in x) echo hello;; esac)
^