Control: tags -1 fixed-upstream
On 2009-08-15 08:12 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> clone 541621 -1
> reassign -1 dash
> retitle -1 dash: ignore value of IFS from environment?
> severity -1 wishlist
> tags 541621 pending
> thanks
>
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 06:42:19PM -0500, Raphael Geissert wrote:
>> When the IFS env var exists man doesn't show anything at all if it doesn't
>> contain a white space. Examples follow:
>>
>> $ PAGER=wc man man
>> 526 4401 39336
>> $ PAGER=wc IFS= man man
>> 0 0 0
>> $ PAGER=wc IFS=' ' man man
>> 526 4401 39336
>>
>> As mentioned during DC9, an easy way to fix the problem is by unsetting IFS
>> in
>> nroff.
>
> I'll work around this in nroff, but I wonder if this is really something
> we should change in dash. It'll be a right pain to have to go around
> changing every shell script in Debian to cope with a silly value of IFS
> in the environment!
>
> POSIX says (IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition; 2.5.3 Shell Variables):
>
> Implementations may ignore the value of IFS in the environment at the
> time the shell is invoked, treating IFS as if it were not set.
>
> It seems to me that it would be most convenient for Debian's default
> /bin/sh to behave this way.
Looks like this has finally been implemented[1], although there is no
released version of dash with the fix yet.
Cheers,
Sven
1.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/dash/dash.git/commit/?id=6458796c79e643503d14e18c611cfbf68c4a8cce
