Friday·20·October·2006
Nice Shell Bloomer //at 16:39 //by abe
from the works-for-me dept.
While looking for users which still have “.”
in their path, I found the following nice bloomer:
PATH=``$PATH:.:$HOME/bin''
It’s obvious what the user tried to do. But why the fuck does this (more or less man or info page alike) quoting syntax work?
It took me a moment to realise that this kind of “quoting” works in nearly all Unix shells: The two backquotes as well as the two single quotes become an empty string and are therefor completely useless in this case.
The user probably read some uglily localized man or info page (like
the German ones in Debian Sarge) and did some copy and paste to his
.bashrc. And since it “worked” he didn’t see
any reason to change it again.
Filed under:
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Tagged as: Admin, bash, DAU, Debian, Documentation, ETH Zürich, Localisation, man page, Sarge, Shell, WFM, WTF
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Tagged as: Admin, bash, DAU, Debian, Documentation, ETH Zürich, Localisation, man page, Sarge, Shell, WFM, WTF
0 comments // show without comments // write a comment //
