It looks like Johannes has already supplied the explanation that was missing from my commit message. Thanks. On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 1:18 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> Before the test for emptyness can happen, the complete statement must be >> parsed, but ksh finds a syntax error in the statement and, therefore, >> cannot even begin to execute the statement. (ksh doesn't follow POSIX in >> this regard, where this would not be a syntax error.) > > I had to stare at Brandon's patch that was essentially: > > - for p in $(FOO); do echo $$p; done > + foo=$(FOO); for p in $$foo; do echo $$p; done > > and the above two doesn't look like there should be any difference; your > explanation makes quite a lot of sense but that's arcane. I doubt I will > be able to justify and explain the latter construction without consulting > your message I am responsing to, if somebody asks "why do we assign $(FOO) > to a shell variable and then iterate over it?" 6 months from now. > > It might make sense to use $(foreach) instead of rolling our own loop in > the shell to avoid glitches like this. $(foreach) works too. I only avoided it because it has already caused a problem once before by creating a command line that exceeded the maximum argument list length on IRIX. REMOTE_CURL_ALIASES only has 3 items in it right now, and probably won't grow much larger, if it grows at all, so there is little chance of exceeding the maximum argument list length on IRIX. So $(foreach) is fine with me if you think that reads better. -Brandon -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html