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Date:	Mon, 7 Jun 1993 04:42:08 -0400
From:	malte@TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE
Message-Id: <9306070842.AA09937@idefix.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
To:	rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu
Subject: Re: here strings
In-Reply-To: Mail from 'John (Most modern computers would break if you stood on them) Mackin <john@civil.su.oz.au>'
      dated: 	Sat, 5 Jun 1993 08:55:54 -0400

So let me say I'm very sorry I didn't get the hint from your mail header:
"John (Most modern computers would break if you stood on them) Mackin".

But to all the non expert text tool users out there: The point is not all
tools deal correctly with non-newline terminated here strings. I spent
quite some time discovering this when I wrote a shell script that ran fine
with path = ( /vol/gnu/bin ... ) but didn't with path = ( /bin ... )
on a Sparc running SunOS 4 and another running SunOS 5.

	; /vol/gnu/bin/sed 's/a/e/g' <<< aaaaaa
	eeeeee
	; /bin/sed 's/a/e/g' <<< aaaaaa
	;

Because of this, I refuse to use here strings since their semantic is confusing
me and - if not avoidable - is replacable by "echo -n", unless someone can
show me a counter example.

I do not want to throw here strings out because that'll probably break a lot
of existing scripts. I'd just wanted to state their superfluousness.

Malte