Re: Procmail rejects zsh as being "broken"

[Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>]

borsenkow.msk@sni.de wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I recently installed procmail-3.11pre4 under zsh-3.0pre4. When running
> 'make init' procmail gave me warning, that `/opt/local/bin/zsh is broken'.
> I checked initmake script and here is relevant part:
> 
> case "$SHELL" in
>  ...
>        *zsh*) $RM src/_autotst
>             $SHELL <<HERE
>             O="echo test >src/_autotst"
>             exec 2>$DEVNULL
>             \$O
> HERE                                                                         
>    
>            if test ! -f src/_autotst                                         
>    
>            then
>               echo "Warning: your $SHELL is broken, avoiding it"; SHELL=""
>            fi ;;
> 
> The test seems to imply, that in
> % foo="echo test > test"
> % $foo
> 
> the line is to be rescanned for I/O redirections *after* foo is expanded. 
> I am not aware of any shell to behave this way. 
> 
> Do I  miss something? What is the sense of this test? And why it is done
> only for zsh ;)?

No, I think it's an incorrect test:  it should probably be something like
O="touch src/_autost"
if what they're doing is testing for word splitting.  But if that *is*
the point, since the test is only for zsh, why don't they simply issue
`setopt shwordsplit' which works in every single version of zsh?

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>       Tel: +49 33762 77366
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/       Fax: +49 33762 77330
Deutches Electronen-Synchrotron --- Institut fuer Hochenergiephysik Zeuthen
DESY-IfH, 15735 Zeuthen, Germany.