From: lmauro AT scientist DOT com (Leo Mauro) Subject: RE: bash-2.x 25 Jul 1998 01:36:00 -0700 Message-ID: <000001bdb715$fcca3b30$1e6e31cf.cygnus.gnu-win32@leo-nt.rd.telesystech.com> References: <199807230858 DOT KAA03131 AT digicash DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: On Thursday, July 23, 1998 04:58 AM Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote: > After all this trouble with bash, i downloaded bash-docs-2.02, > and it says: > > for name [ in word; ] do list ; done [SNIP] > Which means that empy word-list is valid, and shouldn't trigger > an error. I agree with your interpretation of the docs, but this is a gray area and detailed interpretations may differ. If you try x= for i in $x; do echo iteration; done You get what you expect: no iterations. I think the "for syntax" is being checked _before_ variable expansion, and then the semantics expand/glob and then do what they are expected. Maybe it won't be too difficult to extend the syntax to handle the explicitly empy word list case. > I also saw that bash-2.x is still in beta, internally the versions are > called 2.02-beta. What about 'if you choose to use beta software, > you suffer?' This is a fact of life. At least the program's code is in the open, so a large population of well-motivated programmers/users can fix whatever it is they don't like or doesn't work. I personally find the frustration of having paid good money for a flawed program is much worse than the aggravation of (normally minor) flaws in open-source programs I could fix if I was motivated enough. > And why is cygnus distributing a beta shell with gnu-windows? Have you noticed that CygWin32's version number is b19? The "b" stands for beta, so caveat emptor. Leo Mauro Principal Scientist TeleSys Technologies, Inc. - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".