The other day, one of our developers accidentally typed the following:
./configure ==prefix=foo ...
and since our configure script and build process is pretty long, he
didn't notice the error until he typed "make install" and it tried to
install into /usr/local. Oops!
Granted, this is clearly a user error, but I wonder if a quick test in
the command line parsing code could have prevented it. Indeed, if you
run the above command, you end up with something like this:
-----
$ ./configure ==prefix=foo
./configure: line 2286: ==prefix=foo: command not found
export CVS_RSH="ssh"
export DDT_PROCESS_TIMEOUT="0"
export DUALCASE="1"
...etc.
-----
You can see that an error occurred, and then my entire environment was
displayed (because a resulting "export $foo" ended up with $foo being
empty). IMHO, it would be ok to error out if "=" is the first
character (especially since the = and - keys are next to each other on
US keyboards -- it might not be too uncommon of a mistake...?).
I have no idea how the AC code is structured, but the generated code
in question in configure is the following:
-----
*=*)
ac_envvar=`expr "x$ac_option" : 'x\([^=]*\)='`
# Reject names that are not valid shell variable names.
expr "x$ac_envvar" : ".*[^_$as_cr_alnum]" >/dev/null &&
{ $as_echo "$as_me: error: invalid variable name: $ac_envvar" >&2
{ (exit 1); exit 1; }; }
eval $ac_envvar=\$ac_optarg
export $ac_envvar ;;
-----
So there's already an attempt to reject invalid shell var names. In
the ==foo=bar case, $ac_envvar ends up empty (hence the eval errors
out and the export ends up displaying the current environment).
Here's a simple addition to the above code that will kick out the
==foo=bar case, although someone smarter than me with expr can
probably come up with something better:
-----
if test -z "$ac_envvar"; then
$as_echo "$as_me: error: invalid variable name: $ac_option" >&2
exit 1
fi
-----
--
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems
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