* Eric Blake wrote on Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 04:01:15PM CEST: > According to Ralf Wildenhues on 6/25/2009 9:18 PM: > > * Jan Madzik wrote on Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 06:48:37PM CEST: > >> I found bug in korn shell (version M-11/16/88f) on AIX 6.1 (tested > >> only on one server instance) and due to this bug I couldn't correctly > >> configure ImageMagick. > > > > Confirmed on AIX 5.3, thanks for the bug report. > > > > This patch should be sufficient to fix this instance of the bug, but > > it's still lacking a testsuite and documentation addition. > > So how exactly do you describe the bug? Using 'echo \c' inside a command > substitution corrupts state until the next command substitution echo?
Yes, I think that's what it is. > When this bug is detected, is it better to just try an alternate means for > printing text without a newline, such as printf, rather than trying to > audit all uses of echo \c? I audited all uses of ECHO_C in Autoconf, Automake, Libtool, and gnulib, and found no problematic instances. I suppose it should be sufficient to recommend to use AS_ECHO_N within scripts, which is what Autoconf does already mostly. Within makefile snippets, an added ; echo >/dev/null should be a suitable workaround, I guess. More generally though, I'd be wary of uses of ECHO_C within command substitutions, as the substitution will strip off a trailing newline anyway, so it shouldn't be a wide-spread problem. Cheers, Ralf
