Re: Bash manual - interactive shell definition

[Pierre Gaston]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:39 PM, Pierre Gaston <pierre.gaston@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Ken Irving <ken.irving@alaska.edu>wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:57:41AM +0200, Pierre Gaston wrote:
>> > On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Ken Irving <ken.irving@alaska.edu>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > > On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 09:16:05AM +0000, Marc Herbert wrote:
>> > > > >> Could this sentence:
>> > > > >>
>> > > > >> "An interactive shell is one started without non-option
>> arguments,
>> > > > >> unless -sis specified, without specifying the
>> > > > >> -c option, and whose input and error output are both connected to
>> > > terminals
>> > > > >> (as determined by isatty(3)), or one started with the -i option.
>> "
>> > > > >>
>> > > > >> be any more confusing?
>> > > > >
>> > > > > Is seems pretty clearly stated to me.
>> > > >
>> > > > Please enlighten us with the priority of English boolean operators.
>> > > >
>> > > > I have never seen a natural language sentence with so many boolean
>> > > operators.
>> > >
>> > > Well I can try.
>> > >
>> > >    An interactive shell is one started without non-option arguments,
>> > >
>> > > If there are any arguments then they must be options...
>> > >
>> > >    unless -s is specified,
>> > >
>> > > bash(1) says: "If the -s option is present ... then commands are read
>> > > from the standard input", which clearly is not interactive.
>> > >
>> >
>> > If you run "bash -s foo bar" in a terminal it starts an interactive
>> shell.
>>
>> Maybe the definition isn't correct, then, if your example is at odds
>> with the first two statements.  The -s is accompanied by foo, and bar
>> is a non-option argument.    I would think that 'foo' would executed as
>> a command, and the the file bar would be run as a script; I don't see
>> how this would be interactive, though.
>>
>> Ken
>>
> The definition is correct but maybe not too clear.
> "unless -s is specified" means  that the first rule is true unless you use
> -s ie you can include non option argument
> if you use -s and still have an interactive shell, so bash -s foo bar is
> interactive (if connected to a terminal)
>
> In fact this clearly stated in the ref manual "The -s invocation option
> may be used to set the positional parameters when an interactive shell is
> started."
>
> The role played by -c is the definition is less clear to me since with -c
> you must give a non option argument  and thus the "non-interactivity" is
> probably covered by the first rule
> and I don't think you can use both -s and -c at the same time. (well you
> can put both but the first one to appear disables the parsing of the second
> one)
>

ah, I found a way to specify both -s and -c :
bash -c -s 'echo $-' foo bar