On 7/30/25 4:52 AM, Michal Sojka wrote:
Bash Version: 5.3
Patch Level: 0
Release Status: release
Description:
When running "cd ''", bash 5.3 fails with "cd: null directory"
while previous versions succeeded without an error and no
directory was changed. I'm not sure whether this is considered a
bug or not.
It's not.
The SUS[1] says "If directory is an empty string,
the results are unspecified.".
https://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1047
The interpretation declaring this to be an error was resolved in 2017.
The current version of the standard
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/cd.html
says "If directory is an empty string, cd shall write a diagnostic message
to standard error and exit with non-zero status." (That text is directly
from the interpretation.)
However, I didn't find anything
related to this change in the NEWS file for bash-5.3. Other
shells (zsh, dash, osh) seem to accept empty directory as cd
argument.
The CHANGES file says:
1. Changes to Bash
a. Per POSIX, a null pathname argument to `cd' is now an error.
when listing the changes that came in bash-5.3-beta.
[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/cd.html
That is out of date, and has been superseded by Issue 8.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
