Re: Problem with brace expansion

[Dennis Williamson]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Dr Alun J. Carr <alun.j.carr@runbox.com> wrote:

There appears to be a bug in bash when using a variable in curly brace expansion, e.g., {1..$n}. I have put the two following test scripts in the attached files looper1.sh and looper2.sh:

#looper1.sh
for i in {1..4}
do
    echo i = $i
done

#looper2.sh
n=4
for i in {1..$n}
do
    echo i = $i
done

Tests were done with bash, ksh, zsh, pdksh, dash and heirloom System V Bourne sh with the following versions:
bash    3.2.57(1)
bash    4.3.33(1)
ksh             version         sh (AT&T Research) 93u+ 2012-08-01
zsh             5.0.5 (x86_64-apple-darwin14.0)
pdksh   stable 5.2.14
dash    stable 0.5.8
sh              ???

Results for bash (both versions give the same result); note that bash fails to expand the curly brace _expression_ in only the second case:

$ bash looper1.sh
i = 1
i = 2
i = 3
i = 4

$ bash looper2.sh
i = {1..4}

Repeating using ksh we get correct expansion of the curly braces:

$ ksh looper1.sh
i = 1
i = 2
i = 3
i = 4

$ ksh looper2.sh
i = 1
i = 2
i = 3
i = 4

And using zsh, the same result as for ksh:

$ zsh looper1.sh
i = 1
i = 2
i = 3
i = 4

$ zsh looper2.sh
i = 1
i = 2
i = 3
i = 4

Neither pdksh (which installs as ksh using homebrew) nor dash handle either case correctly:

pdksh:

$ /usr/local/bin/ksh looper1.sh
i = {1..4}

$ /usr/local/bin/ksh looper2.sh
i = {1..4}

dash:

$ dash looper1.sh
i = {1..4}

$ dash looper2.sh
i = {1..4}

The System V sh from the heirloom project behaves the same way as pdksh and dash (or more correctly, since System V is really the reference, pdksh and dash behave the same way as SysV sh):

$ 5 sh looper1.sh
i = {1..4}

$ 5 sh looper2.sh
i = {1..4}

Bash performs brace expansion before variable expansion and thus does not support the feature that zsh and ksh have which do variable expansion before brace expansion.

To use a variable, use C-style for loops:

for ((i = 1; i <= 4; i++))

--

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