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Shell Substitutions

Contrary to a persistent urban legend, the Bourne shell does not systematically split variables and backquoted expressions, in particular on the right-hand side of assignments and in the argument of case. For instance, the following code:

case "$given_srcdir" in
.)  top_srcdir="`echo "$dots" | sed 's,/$,,'`"
*)  top_srcdir="$dots$given_srcdir" ;;
esac

is more readable when written as:

case $given_srcdir in
.)  top_srcdir=`echo "$dots" | sed 's,/$,,'`
*)  top_srcdir=$dots$given_srcdir ;;
esac

and in fact it is even more portable: in the first case of the first attempt, the computation of top_srcdir is not portable, since not all shells properly understand "`..."..."...`". Worse yet, not all shells understand "`...\"...\"...`" the same way. There is just no portable way to use double-quoted strings inside double-quoted backquoted expressions (pfew!).

$@

One of the most famous shell-portability issues is related to `"$@"': when there are no positional arguments, it is supposed to be equivalent to nothing. But some shells, for instance under Digital Unix 4.0 and 5.0, will then replace it with an empty argument. To be portable, use `${1+"$@"}'.

${var:-value}

Old BSD shells, including the Ultrix sh, don't accept the colon for any shell substitution, and complain and die.

${var=literal}

Be sure to quote:

: ${var='Some words'}

otherwise some shells, such as on Digital Unix V 5.0, will die because of a "bad substitution". Solaris' @command{/bin/sh} has a frightening bug in its interpretation of this. Imagine you need set a variable to a string containing `}'. This `}' character confuses Solaris' @command{/bin/sh} when the affected variable was already set. This bug can be exercised by running:

$ unset foo
$ foo=${foo='}'}
$ echo $foo
}
$ foo=${foo='}'   # no error; this hints to what the bug is
$ echo $foo
}
$ foo=${foo='}'}
$ echo $foo
}}
 ^ ugh!

It seems that `}' is interpreted as matching `${', even though it is enclosed in single quotes. The problem doesn't happen using double quotes.

${var=expanded-value}

On Ultrix, running

default="yu,yaa"
: ${var="$default"}

will set var to `M-yM-uM-,M-yM-aM-a', i.e., the 8th bit of each char will be set. You won't observe the phenomenon using a simple `echo $var' since apparently the shell resets the 8th bit when it expands $var. Here are two means to make this shell confess its sins:

$ cat -v <<EOF
$var
EOF

and

$ set | grep '^var=' | cat -v

One classic incarnation of this bug is:

default="a b c"
: ${list="$default"}
for c in $list; do
  echo $c
done

You'll get `a b c' on a single line. Why? Because there are no spaces in `$list': there are `M- ', i.e., spaces with the 8th bit set, hence no IFS splitting is performed!!! One piece of good news is that Ultrix works fine with `: ${list=$default}'; i.e., if you don't quote. The bad news is then that QNX 4.25 then sets list to the last item of default! The portable way out consists in using a double assignment, to switch the 8th bit twice on Ultrix:

list=${list="$default"}

...but beware of the `}' bug from Solaris (see above). For safety, use:

test "${var+set}" = set || var={value}

`commands`

While in general it makes no sense, do not substitute a single builtin with side effects as Ash 0.2, trying to optimize, does not fork a sub-shell to perform the command. For instance, if you wanted to check that @command{cd} is silent, do not use `test -z "`cd /`"' because the following can happen:

$ pwd
/tmp
$ test -n "`cd /`" && pwd
/

The result of `foo=`exit 1`' is left as an exercise to the reader.

$(commands)

This construct is meant to replace ``commands`'; they can be nested while this is impossible to do portably with back quotes. Unfortunately it is not yet widely supported. Most notably, even recent releases of Solaris don't support it:

$ showrev -c /bin/sh | grep version
Command version: SunOS 5.8 Generic 109324-02 February 2001
$ echo $(echo blah)
syntax error: `(' unexpected

nor does IRIX 6.5's Bourne shell:

$ uname -a
IRIX firebird-image 6.5 07151432 IP22
$ echo $(echo blah)
$(echo blah)

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