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	sedalia.sinet.slb.com
Subject: Re: A patch to add builtin read (small bug)
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 23 Sep 1993 17:28:11 +0200."
Reply-To: vons@cesar.crbca1.sinet.slb.com
Date:	Thu, 23 Sep 1993 12:03:47 -0400


[Tom wrote:]
 |At least one of those bug fixes I mentioned prevents a crash, you really
 |should look into them.

Ok, someone has a "jumbo" patch against a vanilla 1.4 ? (saves me from
scanning the archive for the actual patches).

 |[ Re: read x;eval 'x=('$x')']
 |
 |Yeah, it's a stunt, and I should have made the standard disclaimer that
 |pathalogical cases would kill it.

A hopefully not_so_pathological example:

   The password file may have * in the password field for some special
   users, which gets expanded to all files in the current directory...

 |[ Re: ifs aware read function]
 |
 |Because you lose information that you can't get back.  For example if
 |you are trying to parse the entries from /etc/passwd to find the home
 |directories, and the comment field is blank:
 |
 |[example with blank fields deleted]
 |
 |and when you try to retrieve $x(6) which should be the directory you get
 |/bin/rc instead!  This may not be the worlds best example but I hope my
 |point is clear.  The way read works now preserves potentially important
 |information.

Ok, good example, but an ifs aware read still allows you to set ifs to
newline before reading, giving you the functionality of the current read.

The risk of loosing information is my responsability I think, it is not
up to the read function to keep me from doing so.

	Gert-Jan

---------------------------------------------------
J.G. Vons   E-Mail: vons@cesar.crbca1.sinet.slb.com