Re: Bug in [ -d ... ] ?

[Eric Blake]

On 11/02/2017 06:03 AM, Michael F Gordon wrote:
> Can anyone explain the following?

Yes.  You used incorrect quoting.

> 
> tla19> set|grep FOOFOOFOO
> tla19> if [ -d ${FOOFOOFOO:=""} ]; then echo YES;fi
> YES

Because you forgot to quote the variable expansion, you ended up executing:

if [ -d ]; then echo YES; fi

and since the one-argument form of [] succeeds if the single argument is
not the empty string, and -d is not the empty string, you got an answer
of YES.

If you want the two-argument form of [], which treats -d as a unary
operator testing whether the second argument names a directory, then you
should have written:

if [ -d "${FOOFOOFOO:=""}" ]; ...

> tla19> echo $BASH_VERSION 
> 4.4.12(1)-release
> 
> I don't get YES printed with 4.1.2(1)-release on Scientific Linux 6. I do
> with 4.2.46(1)-release on Scientific Linux 7 and it happens with the latest
> release on both.

Are you sure you tested correctly?  test has always behaved differently
for one argument than for two.

At any rate, this is not a bug in bash, but more likely in your script.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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