Re: [PATCH] Allow shell scripts to run with non-Bash /bin/sh

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Sep 23, 2007, 08:59 UTC
Message-ID: <85ir61rc3r.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <7vtzpnf6c9.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Eygene Ryabinkin <rea-git@codelabs.ru> writes:
>
>> OK, you're right.  Especially if /bin/sh from Solaris and OpenBSD
>> are working and they are not Bash.  But I would not tell that
>> the shell is broken now -- I had not seen the POSIX specification.
>> Does it specifies how the shell should work in this case?
>
> I have always been assuming it to be the case (this construct is
> not my invention but is an old school idiom I just inherited
> from my mentor) and never looked at the spec recently, but I
> re-read it just to make sure.  The answer is yes.

Independent of that: would you mind a patch replacing that idiom with

while : do case xxx) break; esac

instead? I find breaking out of the condition rather than the body awkward, and I find a non-matching case statement, POSIX or not, quite unobvious in the place of a true while condition.

It is a bit too much of cleverness for my taste. Never mind that the current FreeBSD shell does not understand it due to being buggy: I find that this is not very readable to the human reader either without a double take.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum