From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 17:24:05 GMT
Subject: Re: Re*: [PATCH] t1503: Fix arithmetic expansion syntax error when using dash
Message-ID: <AANLkTimdUC++Lq1z4i5E8cw5ej7nQhZ6hcNoffQ1tM9i@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4C9E2CA6.2070805@ramsay1.demon.co.uk>

On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 17:08, Ramsay Jones <ramsay@ramsay1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> POSIX wants shells to support both "N" and "$N" and requires them to yield
>> the same answer to $((N)) and $(($N)), but we should aim for portability
>> in a case like this, especially when the price we pay to do so is so
>> small, i.e. a few extra dollars.
>
> Indeed
>
>> By the way, on my box, I get this:
>>
>>     $ ls l /bin/dash
>>     -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 104024 2008-08-26 02:36 /bin/dash*
>>     $ dpkg -l dash | grep '^ii'
>>     ii  dash              0.5.4-12          POSIX-compliant shell
>>     $ /bin/dash -c 'N=20 ; echo $(( N + 3 ))'
>>     23
>
> Ah, yes, I should have checked for this... particularly since I now
> vaguely remember reading that this had been "fixed"... *blush*
> Sorry about that.
>
> For the record, on my system I get:
>
>    $ ls -l /bin/dash
>    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80500 2007-03-05 06:00 /bin/dash*
>    $ dpkg -l dash | grep '^ii'
>    ii  dash           0.5.3-5ubuntu2 The Debian Almquist Shell
>    $ /bin/dash -c 'N=20; echo $(( N + 3 ))'
>    /bin/dash: arith: syntax error: " N + 3 "
>
>> I just left it vague by saying "e.g. older dash" in below, but we may want
>> to be more precise in the documentation.
>
> I found a bug report:
>
>    http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dash/+bug/92189
>
> which had a post against it which implied that this was fixed in
> version 0.5.4-3. I went over to packages.debian.org to read the
> ChangeLog for this version, but I could not conclude anything
> from that text. :(
>
> Do we need to be more precise?

If you want to spend the effort to track it down that would be
great. There's a dash git repository on kernel.org you can probably
bisect:

    http://git.kernel.org/?p=utils/dash/dash.git;a=summary