Re: ="${!a[@]}" expands incorrectly bash 5.1 and above + patch

On 5/24/26 5:31 AM, Emanuele Torre wrote:

> The current order of these cases does not seem logical to me; it is
> probably incorrect: I would expect the PF_ASSIGNRHS case not to care
> about whether the expansion is quoted, and thus also to take precedence
> over the case for double quoted expansions outside of assignments.

Thanks for the report.

The question is consistency: does quoted $@ in a context where word
splitting doesn't take place behave the same as unquoted $@, or does
it behave like quoted $*? (This only makes a difference when IFS is
not the default, so it's a niche case.)

There was a pretty decent discussion about this in the replies to your
message from last November that you reference later; kre points out
that the behavior of all of this is unspecified, and there are two
camps, one for each interpretation.


> Unless I am missing something, reordering those two cases seems to fix
> the regression; so, the fix probably looks similar to something like
> this:

You didn't run the test suite, did you.

Anyway, I agree with you: it's better to have consistent behavior between
quoted and unquoted $@ in a context where word splitting doesn't take
place, than to have quoted $@ and $* behave the same.

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    [email protected]    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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