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Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)Posted Dec 9, 2011 12:19 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks) by HelloWorld Parent article: Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)
This feature was actually added to bash at one point: it could export the offsets of globbed arguments to child processes in an environment variable. But it was quietly removed years ago, so presumably there were problems with it.
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Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks) Posted Dec 9, 2011 12:38 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] That's rather interesting, actually. I guess it was removed because there are corner cases left. For example, something like
touch -- --harmful-flag
foo=(*)
foobar "${foo[@]}"
would likely still not be caught. Of course, it would be possible to treat variable expansions as positional arguments as well, but that would probably break lots of scripts. Incrementally building a list of flags in a shell variable is a common idiom, after all.
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