Re: [PATCH/RFC] git-am: Make it easier to see which patch failed

From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date: Jan 18, 2009, 16:49 UTC
Message-ID: <200901181749.52896.trast@student.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0901181711090.3586@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Sun, 18 Jan 2009, Jeff King wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 10:41:13AM +0100, Stephan Beyer wrote:
> > > Hmm, IIRC if $FIRSTLINE contains \n or something like that, it will
> > > interpret this as newline in some shell/echo implementations.
> > > 
> > > So printf "...%s..." "$FOO" is always sane for user input.
> 
> But you are wrong.  And Stephan is wrong, too.
> 
> The name "FIRSTLINE" suggests that it is indeed a first line, and 
> consequently cannot contain a newline.

I think the point was that $FIRSTLINE can contain a backslash sequence such as (literally) \n or \r. Indeed 'man 1p echo' on my system says

  _string_  A string to be written to standard output. If the first
            operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain a
            backslash ( '\' ) character, the results are
            implementation- defined.

(Those POSIX manpages are really useful!)

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch