If an alias's value ends with a space or tab, the next word is also
checked for aliases.
This is a POSIX feature. It is useful with utilities like command and
nohup (alias them to themselves followed by a space).
Formerly, return always returned from a function if it was called from a
function, even if there was a closer dot script. This was for compatibility
with the Bourne shell which only allowed returning from functions.
Other modern shells and POSIX return from the function or the dot script,
whichever is closest.
Git 1.8.4's rebase --continue depends on the POSIX behaviour.
Reported by: Christoph Mallon, avg
* If read -t times out, return status as if interrupted by SIGALRM
(formerly 1).
* If a trapped signal interrupts read, return status 128+sig (formerly 1).
* If [EINTR] occurs but there is no trap, retry the read (for example
because of a SIGWINCH in interactive mode).
* If a read error occurs, write an error message and return status 2.
As before, a variable assignment error returns 2 and discards the remaining
data read.
In some other shells, things like $((a);(b)) are command substitutions.
Also, there are shells that have an extension ((ARITH)) that evaluates an
arithmetic expression and returns status 1 if the result is zero, 0
otherwise. This extension may lead to ambiguity with two subshells starting
in sequence.
Instead of rechecking relative paths for all hashed utilities after a cd,
track if any utility in cmdtable depends on a relative path in PATH.
If there is such a utility, cd clears the entire table.
As a result, the '*' in hash no longer happens.
Examples:
export x=~
now expands the tilde
local y=$1
is now safe, even if $1 contains IFS characters or metacharacters.
For a word to "look like an assignment", it must start with a name followed
by an equals sign, none of which may be quoted.
The special treatment applies when the first word (potentially after
"command") is "export", "readonly" or "local". There may be quoting
characters but no expansions. If "local" is overridden with a function there
is no special treatment ("export" and "readonly" cannot be overridden with a
function).
If things like
local arr=(1 2 3)
are ever allowed in the future, they cannot call a "local" function. This
would either be a run-time error or it would call the builtin.
This matches Austin Group bug #351, planned for the next issue of POSIX.1.
PR: bin/166771
quotation. Also make sure we have the same amount of columns in each row as
the number of columns we specify in the head arguments.
Reviewed by: brueffer
Because sh executes commands in subshell environments without forking in
more and more cases (particularly from 8.0 on), it makes sense to describe
subshell environments more precisely using ideas from POSIX, together with
some FreeBSD-specific items.
In particular, the hash and times builtins may not behave as if their state
is copied for a subshell environment while leaving the parent shell
environment unchanged.
* Shell patterns are also for ${var#pat} and the like.
* An '!' by itself will not trigger pathname generation so do not call it a
meta-character, even though it has a special meaning directly after an
'['.
* Character ranges are locale-dependent.
* A '^' will complement a character class like '!' but is non-standard.
MFC after: 1 week
POSIX requires a -h option to sh and set, to locate and remember utilities
invoked by functions as they are defined. Given that this
locate-and-remember process is optional elsewhere, it seems safe enough to
make this option do nothing.
POSIX does not specify a long name for this option. Follow ksh in calling it
"trackall".
Replacing ;; with the new control operator ;& will cause the next list to be
executed as well without checking its pattern, continuing until a list ends
with ;; or until the end of the case statement. This is like omitting
"break" in a C "switch" statement.
The sequence ;& was formerly invalid.
This feature is proposed for the next POSIX issue in Austin Group issue
#449.
In optimized command substitution, save and restore any variables changed by
expansions (${var=value} and $((var=assigned))), instead of trying to
determine if an expansion may cause such changes.
If $! is referenced in optimized command substitution, do not cause jobs to
be remembered longer.
This fixes $(jobs $!) again, simplifies the man page and shortens the code.
The function name expandstr() and the general idea of doing this kind of
expansion by treating the text as a here document without end marker is from
dash.
All variants of parameter expansion and arithmetic expansion also work (the
latter is not required by POSIX but it does not take extra code and many
other shells also allow it).
Command substitution is prevented because I think it causes too much code to
be re-entered (for example creating an unbounded recursion of trace lines).
Unfortunately, our LINENO is somewhat crude, otherwise PS4='$LINENO+ ' would
be quite useful.
This reflects failure to determine the pathname of the new directory in the
exit status (1). Normally, cd returns successfully if it did chdir() and the
call was successful.
In POSIX, -e only has meaning with -P; because our -L is not entirely
compliant and may fall back to -P mode, -e has some effect with -L as well.
Because we have no iconv in base, support for other charsets is not
possible.
Note that \u/\U are processed using the locale that was active when the
shell started. This is necessary to avoid behaviour that depends on the
parse/execute split (for example when placing braces around an entire
script). Therefore, UTF-8 encoding is implemented manually.
A string between $' and ' may contain backslash escape sequences similar to
the ones in a C string constant (except that a single-quote must be escaped
and a double-quote need not be). Details are in the sh(1) man page.
This construct is useful to include unprintable characters, tabs and
newlines in strings; while this can be done with a command substitution
containing a printf command, that needs ugly workarounds if the result is to
end with a newline as command substitution removes all trailing newlines.
The construct may also be useful in future to describe unprintable
characters without needing to write those characters themselves in 'set -x',
'export -p' and the like.
The implementation attempts to comply to the proposal for the next issue of
the POSIX specification. Because this construct is not in POSIX.1-2008,
using it in scripts intended to be portable is unwise.
Matching the minimal locale support in the rest of sh, the \u and \U
sequences are currently not useful.
Exp-run done by: pav (with some other sh(1) changes)
POSIX does not require the shell to fork for a subshell environment, and we
use that possibility in various ways (command substitutions with a single
command and most subshells that are the final command of a shell process).
Therefore do not tie subshells to forking in the man page.
Command substitutions with expansions are a bit strange, causing a fork for
$(...$(($x))...) because $x might expand to y=2; they will probably be
changed later but this is how they work now.
If execve() returns an [ENOEXEC] error, check if the file is binary before
trying to execute it using sh. A file is considered binary if at least one
of the first 256 bytes is '\0'.
In particular, trying to execute ELF binaries for the wrong architecture now
fails with an "Exec format error" message instead of syntax errors and
potentially strange results.
These are called "shell procedures" in the source.
If execve() failed with [ENOEXEC], the shell would reinitialize itself
and execute the program as a script. This requires a fair amount of code
which is not frequently used (most scripts have a #! magic number).
Therefore just execute a new instance of sh (_PATH_BSHELL) to run the
script.
This allows specifying a %job (which is equivalent to the corresponding
process group).
Additionally, it improves reliability of kill from sh in high-load
situations and ensures "kill" finds the correct utility regardless of PATH,
as required by POSIX (unless the undocumented %builtin mechanism is used).
Side effect: fatal errors (any error other than kill(2) failure) now return
exit status 2 instead of 1. (This is consistent with other sh builtins, but
not in NetBSD.)
Code size increases about 1K on i386.
Obtained from: NetBSD
Make sure all built-in commands are in the subsection named such, except
exp, let and wordexp which are deliberately undocumented. The text said only
built-ins that really need to be a built-in were documented there but in
fact almost all of them were already documented.
This was removed in 2001 but I think it is appropriate to add it back:
* I do not want to encourage people to write fragile and non-portable echo
commands by making printf much slower than echo.
* Recent versions of Autoconf use it a lot.
* Almost no software still wants to support systems that do not have
printf(1) at all.
* In many other shells printf is already a builtin.
Side effect: printf is now always the builtin version (which behaves
identically to /usr/bin/printf) and cannot be overridden via PATH (except
via the undocumented %builtin mechanism).
Code size increases about 5K on i386. Embedded folks might want to replace
/usr/bin/printf with a hard link to /usr/bin/alias.
In particular, remove the text about ksh-like features, which are usually
taken for granted nowadays. The original Bourne shell is fading away and for
most users our /bin/sh is one of the most minimalistic they know.
