Re: -i option of set missing in man bash

[Chet Ramey]

On 3/13/15 8:47 PM, Eduardo A. Bustamante López wrote:
>> You can avoid these surprises by making -i just as other options, i.e.,
>> working within the shell not just when a shell is started. [..]
> I don't think it's good to have set +/-i available after initialization. It's
> more complex to handle, and with little (or null?) gain. If you're using
> set -i inside a script, then you're clearly doing it the wrong way (whatever
> you're trying to achieve).
> 
> *But* I do think it's misleading to have bash accept the 'i' flag, but not
> others. It also leads people to think that setting it from 'set' "worked",
> because it's in $- "if it has an 'i' in $-, then it *must* be interactive,
> right?", wrong.

Here's the other side: allowing `set -$-' to succeed keeps a Posix-mode
shell running a script from throwing a fatal error.  Allowing it also
keeps the bug reports down.  The same rationale can be used to add -c and
-s to the no-op flags, since those are command-line options that end up
in $-.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/