Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20001024211121.00ac9ac0@pop5.banet.net> X-Sender: usbanet DOT farley3 AT pop5 DOT banet DOT net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.1 Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 21:35:47 -0400 To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com From: "Peter J. Farley III" Subject: Re: Bash 2.04 beta 6a Cc: Eli Zaretskii In-Reply-To: References: <4 DOT 3 DOT 1 DOT 0 DOT 20001023205604 DOT 00b0edf0 AT pop5 DOT banet DOT net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk At 09:31 AM 10/24/00 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote: >Sorry for asking a Perl-illiterate question: What exactly is the >importance of the backslashes in "\\#foo"? Why does it affect the way >the above snippet works? Well, I'm not the one to ask that. All I did was make an educated guess as to what would make the test work. I thought the "#foo" in a double-quoted string might be being "substituted" as a perl variable whose value was null, so "escaping" the "#" operator would cause it to be treated as a literal. A single escape ("\#foo") did not work, but the double-escape did work, and caused the test to work the way it was supposed to work. >Also, can you outline the Perl implementation of this feature, in >terms of libc functions that get called when Perl processes the >command such as "echo #foo|"? No clue. I have no idea how the internals of this function work, I'm just tinkering around the edges. JAPH I'm not (that's "Just Another Perl Hacker"). >Anyway, my first suspicion would be some kind of buffering problem. >IIRC, the DJGPP port of Perl uses some FSEXT trick for implementing >invocations of external programs in some cases (I forget the details, >or perhaps I never knew them). If so, it could be that an fflush >and/or an fsync somewhere is what you need to fix this. Good advice. I will speak privately with Laszlo Molnar and ask him if he has a better idea of the way the internals work. >You seem to be assuming that this is a Bash problem. Why do you think >that? Does Bash 2.03 work with this example? A couple of folk who work on the VMS version of perl suggested in might be a shell-related problem, so I promised I'd ask about it on this list. I have no detailed knowledge to suggest whether they are right or wrong, I just thought I'd ask over here to see if it was a known (and possibly fixed) problem. As for bash 2.03, the current development versions of perl will not build or test at all with that version, which is why I switched to v2.04. As I said to Mark, I will try to work up a pure-bash example, if I can. If I can't, then it is probably not a bash problem at all, as you suggest. I'll report back here soon. --------------------------------------------------------- Peter J. Farley III (pjfarley AT dorsai DOT org OR pjfarley AT banet DOT net)