Re: Fwd: read -n is confused by \

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, Brett Kail wrote:

> Hello,
>
> This is a resend of a message I sent back in May since I never
> received a reply to that message.
[....]
> Description:
>    If the nth character of read -n is a \, then bash reads one too
> many characters.
>
> Repeat-By:
>    echo 'abc\abc' | (read -n 4; echo $REPLY)

   This is fixed in 3.1,

> Additionally, the documentation for 'read' is unclear what happens for
> \ when -r is not specified in that it does not distinguish between
> "maximum number of characters read" and "maximum number of characters
> read into the variable".

   Presumably, without -r, the backslash is not considered a
   character, it is an escape mechanism.

--
   Chris F.A. Johnson                      <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
   ===================================================================
   Author:
   Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)