On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 7:37 AM, Piotr Grzybowski <narsil...@gmail.com> wrote:
It seems to me that creating the reference should be allowed, but the > access to the referenced variable should honor its attributes. > Once you convert the variable to a reference, you can control its value by modifying the value of a different variable with the name that corresponds to the value of the readonly variable, so “access to the referenced variable should honor its attributes” probably won’t do much (If I understand your suggestion correctly). In a less convoluted example that doesn’t rely on creating our own namerefs: readonly USER=sandbox USER=root # bash: USER: readonly variable declare -n USER sandbox=root # works USER=root # works [[ $USER == root ]] # 0 # USER is unchanged, other than the -n attributedeclare -p USER # declare -nrx USER="sandbox" ------------------------------ The above works when the readonly variable has a value that is also a valid identifier. In my previous example I worked around this using the fact that ref=<whatever>; declare -n ref does not check to make sure that $ref is a valid identifier. So: readonly PATH=/opt/bin ref=$PATHdeclare -n ref ref=/usr/bindeclare -p /opt/bin # declare -- /opt/bin="/usr/bin" declare -n PATH # declare -nr PATH="/opt/bin"echo $PATH # /usr/bin
