Bash Quirkiness

Robert P. J. Day rpjday at mindspring.com
Tue Jul 27 00:35:25 UTC 2004


On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, James Wilkinson wrote:

> Alexander Dalloz wrote:
>> $(foo) is the current notation and some day ` ` (backticks) will go away
>> from bash (by it's developers).
>
> OUCH!
>
> I hope not. That will break more UNIX setups than any other changeover
> I've ever heard of.
>
> Yes, $() is more elegant, but the sheer weight of legacy `` means that
> I'd back the backticks over the bash maintainers in any battle for their
> continued survival...

both $( ) and `` are, as i read it, part of the official Single UNIX 
Specification (therefore, they're part of POSIX), which means that 
bash pretty much has to keep the older construct, at the very least 
in POSIX-compliant mode.

nothing says that bash has to be POSIX-compliant in normal mode, 
though.  technically, i suppose the bash developers could make any 
changes they want, and if it broke one of your scripts, well, tough, 
you don't have a bash-compliant script and you shouldn't be trying to 
run it with bash.

i'm just speculating, though.

rday





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