Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 31 Mar 2000 20:31:45 +0200
From:      Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>
To:        Richard Brooksby <rb@ravenbrook.com>
Cc:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG, Ravenbrook System Administrators <sysadmins@ravenbrook.com>
Subject:   Re: Something funny about ampersand in /bin/sh
Message-ID:  <20000331203145.A22722@cons.org>
In-Reply-To: <p04310108b50a81a4dec3@[193.82.131.28]>; from rb@ravenbrook.com on Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 05:31:46PM %2B0100
References:  <p04310108b50a81a4dec3@[193.82.131.28]>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In <p04310108b50a81a4dec3@[193.82.131.28]>, Richard Brooksby wrote: 
> [Please retain Cc line when reply to this message.]
> 
> I've just installed FreeBSD 3.4 on our new server and started 
> migrating various things from our old server (running FreeBSD 2.2.8). 
> One of my shell scripts broke, claiming "ambiguous redirection".  By 
> trial and error I discovered that ampersands are being treated 
> specially in the shell in some way.  For example, this no longer 
> works:
> 
>    echo 2>&1 foo
> 
> Instead of writing "foo" to stdout this puts "foo" in a file called "1".
> 
> This looks like a serious bug in the shell to me, since it breaks a 
> lot of shell scripts which use this kind of redirection.
> 
> Mysteriously, this works:
> 
>    sh -c 'echo 2>&1 foo'

Sorry, I tried FreeBSD's /bin/sh on 3.4-STABLE, 4.0-STABLE and
5.0-current and all work right.

$PWD2(\h)\!% uname -r
3.4-STABLE
$PWD2(\h)\!% echo 2>&1 foo
foo
$PWD2(\h)\!% cat 1
cat: 1: No such file or directory

I assume that your example runs on another shell that got in your way
while upgrading.

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
  Tel.: (private) +4940 5221829 Fax.: (private) +4940 5228536


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000331203145.A22722>