Dan Jacobson uncovered what I believe is a bash bug: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.shells.bash.bugs/8574 See my arguments as to why I think this is a violation of POSIX rules: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.shells.bash.bugs/8575 Although the Shell Substitutions portion of the manual already recommends using `foo` instead of $(foo), it may be worth adding to that section to also document that bash 3.0 (I haven't verified whether bash 3.1 has fixed the bug), zsh (as of 4.2.6), and ksh (5.2.14) all have a bug in parsing command substitutions with an embedded case, when you don' t use a leading ( for each pattern: $ k=$(case x in x) echo hi ; esac) bash: syntax error near unexpected token `esac' $ k=`case x in x) echo hi ; esac` $ echo $k hi $ k=$(case x in (x) echo bye ; esac) $ echo $k bye For that matter, the following examples are required in the POSIX rationale, but are misparsed by several shells: Required: $ echo $( > cat <</eof > a here-doc with ) > eof > ) a here-doc with ) $ echo $( > echo abc # a comment with ) > ) abc $ bash: $ echo $( > cat << /eof > a here-doc with ) a here-doc with $ echo $( > echo abc # a comment with ) > ) abc ) $ -- Eric Blake _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
