On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 12:45 PM, Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues@xxxxxx> wrote: > Hello, > > is this nice little Bourne shell quirk already known? > > $ for i in 1 2 3 ; do : >x$i; done > $ ls > x1 > > It works when I use 'echo' instead of ':'. > > Seen with Solaris 10 sh, but also some other old shells IIRC. Are there any shells around older than a Solaris /bin/sh ?? Over 20 years old, IIRC. Anyway, for amusement: # for i in 1 2 3 ; do : >x$i ; sleep 60 ; done ; date ; ls -l x* Wednesday, September 3, 2008 1:25:25 PM PDT -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 3 13:22 x1 it seems that the no-op is removed from the loop after the first iteration. I guessed as much, but this makes it clearer. Pretty weird. - Bruce _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
