On 11/23/2017 02:23 AM, Chet Ramey wrote:
The bash-4.2 man page defers the description of here strings to the description of here documents. The lines in a here document do not undergo word splitting. It was a bug in bash-4.2 that the WORD in a here string was split.This finally got fixed in bash-4.4, as described by this CHANGES entry: z. Bash no longer splits the expansion of here-strings, as the documentation has always said.
I would think it is useful (and according to how things work in general) to have a different behavior for <<<"$a" and <<<$a
If one wants to have all line-breaks, spaces and tabs preserved, use <<<"$a" otherwise use <<<$a
Peter
