Package: bash Version: 4.1-3 Severity: normal *** Please type your report below this line ***
The manpage says: "[1] If |& is used, the standard error of command is connected to command2's standard input through the pipe; [2] it is shorthand for 2>&1 |. This implicit redirection of the standard error is performed after any redirections specified by the command." At first glance, [1] and [2] say the same, but that's not so, as this example shows: % sh -c 'echo stdout; echo stderr >&2' > /dev/null |& cat Here, both stdout and stderr are redirected to /dev/null. That's what [2] says, but not what [1] says. So at the very least this is a documentation bug, and the manpage should say: "If |& is used, the standard error of command is connected to whatever the standard output is connected to which may or may not be the pipe to command2's standard input;" However, I wonder if the behaviour is really very meaningful. Since the "|&" token refers to the pipe syntactically, one would naively expect that its behaviour has to do with the pipe. Of course, it's easy to work-around by wrapping the command in a subshell which does what I'd have expected: % (sh -c 'echo stdout; echo stderr >&2' > /dev/null) |& cat stderr -- System Information: Debian Release: 6.0.2 APT prefers stable APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'testing') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 3.2.2 (SMP w/6 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=de_DE, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages bash depends on: ii base-files 6.0squeeze2 Debian base system miscellaneous f ii dash 0.5.5.1-7.4 POSIX-compliant shell ii debianutils 3.4 Miscellaneous utilities specific t ii libc6 2.13-10 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib ii libncurses5 5.7+20100313-5 shared libraries for terminal hand Versions of packages bash recommends: ii bash-completion 1:1.2-3 programmable completion for the ba Versions of packages bash suggests: pn bash-doc <none> (no description available) -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
