Bourne Shell bug? Have a look..

[Chet Ramey]

Paolo Ventafridda writes:

$ Please have a look at this small program written in standard
$ Bourne shell:
$ 
$ :
$ set "one two three 4"
$ if [ "`echo $@ | grep '4'" != "" ]; then 
$ 	echo "Four"
$ fi
$ 
$ 
$ Now, notice that a      `    is missing in the "if" above!
$ It works without any problems all the same: on Xenix, SCO Unix,
$ 3B2, HP-UX and i guess on any bourne shell whose sources are
$ coming from at&t.
$ It seems that only BASH gets the error.

The `standard' AT&T Bourne shell will silently add a missing
closing delimiter when it hits EOF.  I don't think ksh does,
except maybe for sh compatibility; this was listed by Korn in
his book as one of the differences between ksh and sh.  Bash
doesn't either. 

Chet

-- 
Chet Ramey				``There's just no surf in
Network Services Group			  Cleveland, U.S.A. ...''
Case Western Reserve University
chet at ins.CWRU.Edu		My opinions are just those, and mine alone.