Re: Weird tr bug?

[Bill Becker]

So i have been told by several kind souls.  Thanks.

Now i have to go through a dozen hosts looking for all the shell scripts
where i may have used tr with unprotected character ranges.  Who knows
when they might blow up and do something terrible?  Good thing i reported
this 'bug'.

Regards,
Bill

On Thu, 9 May 2002, John P. Rouillard wrote:

> 
> Bill Becker said:
> >biteme:~$ mkdir temp
> biteme:~$ cd temp
> >biteme:~/temp$ echo XoX | tr [A-Z] [a-z]
> >xox
> >biteme:~/temp$ touch m
> >biteme:~/temp$ echo XoX | tr [A-Z] [a-z]
> >mom
> 
> Don't forget that [a-z] is only the literal character [, a, -, z, ],
> if there is no file in the directory that matches the [a-z] glob. In
> your case, the single character file 'm' matches, and the shell turns
> [a-z] into m, and you see the result.
> 
> Answer, use '' around shell metacharacters.
> 
> 
>    echo XoX | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'
>    xox
> 
> works for me.
> 
> 
>                               -- rouilj
> John Rouillard
> ===============================================================================
> My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.
>