A NOTE has been added to this issue. ====================================================================== https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1561 ====================================================================== Reported By: calestyo Assigned To: ====================================================================== Project: Issue 8 drafts Issue ID: 1561 Category: Shell and Utilities Type: Enhancement Request Severity: Editorial Priority: normal Status: New Name: Christoph Anton Mitterer Organization: User Reference: Section: various Page Number: N/A Line Number: N/A Final Accepted Text: ====================================================================== Date Submitted: 2022-02-01 00:10 UTC Last Modified: 2022-02-01 23:07 UTC ====================================================================== Summary: clarify what kind of data shell variables need to be able to hold ======================================================================
---------------------------------------------------------------------- (0005650) kre (reporter) - 2022-02-01 23:07 https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1561#c5650 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Re 4) again, I agree, unspecified. But re https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1561#c5649 I thought that it was unspecified whether such things are passed through to children. Our shell creates vars from the environment (exported ones of course) when the names are valid, and ignores anything else it sees there. When running a child process all exported sh variables (and nothing else) is passed to the child as its environment. I suspect that the question about arrays was assuming that the environment might contain something like: ARRAY[4]=7 if some shel decided to permit exporting individual elements of an array, Lastly, and I'm not sure if this shold be considered as part of 2) or added as a new 5) - but is it anywhere specified what the shell is supposed to do if it receives an environment which contains X=1 X=2 X=3 ?? Shells will never create such a thing, and I don't believe the env command can do it either, but purpose written C code can easily set that up. rather than the whole array (in the case that a whole array is exported, how does bash, when importing it, distinguish that from a scalar var whose contents just happen to be identical to whatever serialized format the array contents are exported like ?) And POSIX only requires POSIX names to work as shell function names, though that is a truly stupid limitation (it permits implementations to extend it, and most do I think). We (NetBSD sh) don't allow exported functions, but we do allow for every shell to read a startup file (not just interactive shells) so functions that one mighth want to export can be written there, and then are available to all who follow (a script can make its own file and arrange for its children to read that one, if it wants to). Lastly, when reading the standard, I believe that we must sometimes use care in assuming that "characters" means locale specific chars, rather than bytes. Much of the text is quite old, and has its origins in even older material, and that far ago, for most concerned people, characters and bytes were the same thing (which is why what we might now call an int8_t in C started out (and still is though sometimes as a uint8_t) also called "char"). Issue History Date Modified Username Field Change ====================================================================== 2022-02-01 00:10 calestyo New Issue 2022-02-01 00:10 calestyo Name => Christoph Anton Mitterer 2022-02-01 00:10 calestyo Section => various 2022-02-01 00:10 calestyo Page Number => N/A 2022-02-01 00:10 calestyo Line Number => N/A 2022-02-01 19:33 mirabilos Note Added: 0005645 2022-02-01 19:44 calestyo Note Added: 0005647 2022-02-01 20:52 chet_ramey Note Added: 0005649 2022-02-01 23:07 kre Note Added: 0005650 ======================================================================
