On 28/10/16 12:54, Tim Ruehsen wrote:
Hi, maybe you can enlighten me :-) I try to use dash (0.5.8-2.3) on Debian unstable for executing ./configure scripts. Since Debian builds with --disable-lineno, all ./configure scripts silently fall back to bash (I created bug report #842242 to get this fixed).
As you found there, this is intentional, specifically to force configure scripts to continue to be run with bash, which is what happened with older dash versions. I asked at the time why they don't just call bash explicitly (bash configure instead of ./configure) if that's the goal, but didn't get a response.
Next I rebuilt the package from the (Debian) sources without --disable-lineno and installed it. Now I see error messages from dash when it comes to the do nothing operator :. $ dash -c 'test -n "a" && :' dash: 1: :: not found $ echo $? 127 $ bash -c 'test -n "a" && :' $ echo $? 0 Since this : construct is wildly used and I know that dash on other systems work with it, I wonder what is wrong here. Is there a known bug, maybe fixed on recent dash versions ? Or has this some simple reason my stupidity doesn't see ?
This is likely to happen if you have the LC_ALL environment variable set when building dash, and I can reproduce your results with 0.5.8 by setting LC_ALL to en_GB.UTF-8. It was fixed in 0.5.9. (Specifically, where a fixed sort order was needed, 0.5.8 only forced LC_COLLATE=C, but that still allowed LC_ALL to override it.)
dash won't be the only program that has problems with this; if you're building software yourself, setting LANG should generally be okay, but LC_ALL is best avoided. Unless you're doing it specifically to find and report/fix bugs, anyway.
Cheers, Harald van Dijk
Regards, Tim
-- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe dash" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
