On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 3:00 AM, Eli Barzilay <e...@barzilay.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 2:02 PM, Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: > > > > It's more of a general statement about arrays, though it appears in > > the paragraph that discusses unset, so it's in the man page section on > > arrays. You have to be careful about putting the same information in > > too many different places -- the man page is big enough already. > > I'm very aware of man page bloat and the fact that the bash page is very > long as is. But (a) I think that the builtin section for each command > is the more important place for such things; and (b) what I'm suggesting > is just a short reminder sentence about the need for quoting unsets for > array elements. > > To make it more concrete, I think that the following change will be > good: > > 1. Drop the current "Care must be taken ... the entire array." two > sentences and replace them with some "See the unset builtin > description below". > It's not only about unset. You also need to take care of other builtin commands: cd: cd a[dir] vs. cd 'a[dir]' echo: echo foo[bar] vs. echo 'foo[bar]'; echo * vs. echo '*' eval: eval a[i]=b vs. eval 'a[i]=b' printf: printf foo[bar] vs. printf 'foo[bar]' set: set a[b] vs. set 'a[b]' source: source file[name] vs. source 'file[name]' test: test a[b] vs. test 'a[b]' ... and even for external commands: find /the/dir -name *.txt