On the bash thing... I think it was a posix compliance thing. The man page for the posix shell states that "{" and "}" are reserved words and the usage is like:
{ list ; } The man page also states that ";" is a metacharacter that can be replaced by one or more newlines. So the following would presumably also work: { list } I also checked the ksh book (The Kornshell Command and Programming Language) and it said the same thing (in more explicit language on page 125 & 161). It seems to me that bash should have honored its extension to allow { list } in any event. The key here is that it was always an extension and not "standard" behavior. How serious a bug it is depends on how much you follow posix. I probably would not have seen this bug since I use linux as a home environment to support my work on hpux and dec osf1. Those systems require the posix/ksh form... jim ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: Stable means not-changing? Author: [EMAIL PROTECTED] at ~AMSCCSSW Date: 9/24/97 8:24 PM [cut stuff] --Pete [*] Does anyone know where there was a doc explaining that "{ foo }" suddenly had to become "{ foo; }" when upgrading to Bash-2.0? That only choked on about a hundred of my scripts that had worked fine under 1.14 (or whatever it was)... -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .