Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:17:26 -0700 From: Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com> To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ZFS vs OSX Time Machine Message-ID: <20110430001726.GA58981@icarus.home.lan> In-Reply-To: <201104290925.03607.jhb@freebsd.org> References: <537A8F4F-A302-40F9-92DF-403388D99B4B@gsoft.com.au> <201104281727.04425.jhb@freebsd.org> <20110428215954.GA34030@icarus.home.lan> <201104290925.03607.jhb@freebsd.org>
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On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 09:25:03AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote: > On Thursday, April 28, 2011 5:59:54 pm Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > > I've seen cases where entries in /boot/loader.conf throw parser errors > > during loader(8) when quotes aren't used. The man page denotes that > > quotes are required, which doesn't appear to be true? Possibly the > > parser only throws errors if non-numeric/non-integer values (e.g. > > strings) are specified without quotes. > > > > It's interesting that in the BUGS section of the man page the syntax > > shown for hw.ata.ata_dma=0 also ""violates"" the ""required"" syntax. > > Yes, it's confusing. My gut instinct is that quotes are only required > if the value contains whitespace. I've certainly used > 'autoboot_delay=NO' without quotes before. > > I just did some tests and it looks like quotes are only required for > values that contain whitespace, so > > foo=bar > bar=42G > baz="foo bar" > > are fine, but > > baz=foo bar > > will fail. > > This is similar to normal shell syntax for assigning to variables. As usual, thanks for the time you spent checking this out and verifying what reality is. :-) I'll file a PR to get the man page updated to reflect things. I believe what I've seen (re: parsing errors) is the latter case example you provided (baz=foo bar). So it seems that using quotes is the overall "safety mechanism" to ensure the value will work, but they're not required. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc@parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP 4BD6C0CB |
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