Bug#773602: Support for unquoted empty environment strings

[Chris Lamb]

Package: cron
Version: 3.0pl1-127
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch

I recently had a Bad Time because the following syntax to specify an
empty environment variable is not supported:

 VAR=

Rather, it should be:

 VAR=""

This is, of course, well-documented (!) but it would be a little more
user-friendly if this Just Worked. This is especially so as it is
not--in my experience--widespread practice to quote non-empty variables,
so one is likely to simply remove the *value* resulting in an invalid
file.. which is then not executed whatsoever.

Patch attached. (An alternative solution would be to test *c within the
EQ1 case, but this looked inferior when I tried it IMHO.)


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      la...@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
       `-

diff --git a/crontab.5 b/crontab.5
index 66ba2e4..c0041a1 100644
--- a/crontab.5
+++ b/crontab.5
@@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ The
 .I value
 string may be placed in quotes (single or double, but matching) to preserve
 leading or trailing blanks. To define an empty variable, quotes
-.B must
+can
 be used. The  
 .I value
 string is 
diff --git a/env.c b/env.c
index 76238ce..6644d6b 100644
--- a/env.c
+++ b/env.c
@@ -231,7 +231,8 @@ load_env(envstr, f)
                        abort();
                }
        }
-       if (state != FINI && !(state == VALUE && !quotechar)) {
+       if (state != FINI && !(state == VALUE && !quotechar) 
+               && !(state == EQ2 && !quotechar)) {
                Debug(DPARS, ("load_env, not an env var, state = %d\n", state))
                fseek(f, filepos, 0);
                Set_LineNum(fileline);