Weird behavior of conditionals with exclamations (ZSH 5.0.7)

Weird behavior of conditionals with exclamations (ZSH 5.0.7)

[Daniel Miranda]

I've recently encountered a bug in Fedora 22 where I get error
messages when browsing a folder that contains exclamation signs in
it's name in GNOME Terminal with ZSH.

I tracked it down to a profile.d script shipped by the VTE terminal
emulation library. The __vte_urlencode function triggers a "too many
arguments" error in the case I mentioned. You can see the code at the
GNOME miirror in Github [1].

The error happens at line 31:

while [ -n "$str" ]; do

If and only if the value of "$str" is '!', a string containing a
single exclamation. It seems the test command somehow attempts to
parse it as a modifier, instead of an actual string to be tested. The
same *does not* happen in Bash. It seems incorrect, or at least
strange, to me.

Somehow using [[ ]] works correctly. I don't know why that is the case.

Is that expected or have I ran into an issue?

Thanks,
Daniel

[1] https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.sh#L26

Re: Weird behavior of conditionals with exclamations (ZSH 5.0.7)

[Bart Schaefer]

On Jun 14,  7:50pm, Daniel Miranda wrote:
}
} while [ -n "$str" ]; do
} 
} If and only if the value of "$str" is '!', a string containing a
} single exclamation. It seems the test command somehow attempts to
} parse it as a modifier, instead of an actual string to be tested.

This has already been fixed in 5.0.8.  I don't know exactly which change
covered it, but:

schaefer[825] zsh-5.0.7 -f
torch% str='!'
torch% while [ -n "$str" ]; do
while> break
while> done
[: too many arguments
torch% 

schaefer[826] zsh-5.0.8 -f
torch% str='!'
torch% while [ -n "$str" ]; do
while> break
while> done
torch% 

Re: Weird behavior of conditionals with exclamations (ZSH 5.0.7)

[Peter Stephenson]

On Sun, 14 Jun 2015 20:19:21 -0700
Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
> On Jun 14,  7:50pm, Daniel Miranda wrote:
> }
> } while [ -n "$str" ]; do
> } 
> } If and only if the value of "$str" is '!', a string containing a
> } single exclamation. It seems the test command somehow attempts to
> } parse it as a modifier, instead of an actual string to be tested.
> 
> This has already been fixed in 5.0.8.

Fairly late: 35306 / cb596a55d9.

pws