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From: | Paul Eggert |
Subject: | bug#54035: Patch for easier use in scripting pipelines |
Date: | Thu, 17 Feb 2022 19:05:45 -0800 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.5.0 |
On 2/16/22 23:57, Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
In order to fix that bug in the above script, you currently have to replace `grep ...` with `grep ... || [ $? = 1 ]`, which is not really readable.
Actually, appending something "|| test $? -eq 1" looks readable to me; plus, it already works and is portable to non-GNU systems which is a plus. Furthermore, it also works with other programs that also return 0,1,>1 depending on success,failure,error (e.g., 'cmp', 'diff', 'sort'), and it doesn't sound like much of a win to add unportable --pipe options to every such program.
And it's not just commands like 'cmp' and 'grep'. The following causes Bash to exit on GNU/Linux:
set -eo pipefail cat /usr/share/dict/american-english | grep -l '^'This is not because of anything 'grep' does, as 'grep' exits with status zero. It's because 'cat' exits with nonzero status. Surely we shouldn't add a --pipe option to 'cat' too.
Scripts that use "set -eo pipefail" need to be verrrry careful regardless of what we do with 'grep'; and if they are careful it won't help much to add a --pipe option to 'grep'.
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