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exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2'
From: |
Eric Blake |
Subject: |
exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2' |
Date: |
Thu, 8 Nov 2018 14:37:11 -0600 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.3.0 |
If I'm reading POSIX correctly, shift is a special built-in utility, and
if '$#' is 0 or 1, then 'shift 2' counts as a utility error that shall
exit the shell, per the table in 2.8.1 Consequences of Shell Errors:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_08_01
dash gets this right:
$ dash -c 'set 1
> shift 2
> echo "oops"'
dash: 2: shift: can't shift that many
but bash happily lets 'shift 2' fail with $? set to 1 but continues on
with execution of the rest of the script, even when in POSIX mode:
$ bash -c 'set 1
> shift 2
> echo "oops"'
oops
$ bash -c 'set 1; set -o posix
> shift 2
> echo "oops"'
oops
I spent more than an hour today figuring out why my shell script was
inf-looping, and traced it back to failure to check for non-zero status
from 'shift 2', where I had been expecting immediate hard failure of the
entire script. I don't care if bash doesn't hard-exit when not in POSIX
mode, and it must not hard-exit when in interactive use; but the
non-interactive use not doing a hard exit seems like a bug.
On the other hand, the POSIX wording for shift, under EXIT STATUS,
weakens the "shall fail" from the earlier table into a weaker "may fail":
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#shift
If the n operand is invalid or is greater than "$#", this may be
considered a syntax error and a non-interactive shell may exit; if the
shell does not exit in this case, a non-zero exit status shall be
returned. Otherwise, zero shall be returned.
Tested on Fedora 28 with bash-4.4.23-1.fc28.x86_64
--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
- exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2',
Eric Blake <=
- Re: exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2', Chet Ramey, 2018/11/08
- Re: exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2', Eric Blake, 2018/11/09
- Re: exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2', Chet Ramey, 2018/11/09
- Re: exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2', Eric Blake, 2018/11/09
- Re: exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2', Chet Ramey, 2018/11/09
- Re: exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2', Eric Blake, 2018/11/09
- Re: exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2', Chet Ramey, 2018/11/09
Re: exiting noninteractive shells on 'shift 2', Grisha Levit, 2018/11/08