Treat $_ as a special variable
"Listeria monocytogenes" <[email protected]> Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:18:13 +0000
| Newsgroups | org.kernel.vger.dash |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hello, The current treatment of the $_ variable leads to spilling the last argument from a command into the environment of the next when dash is invoked interactively from bash or zsh, as in: bash$ dash dash$ echo hello hello dash$ env | grep ^_= _=hello This is because bash exports _=/usr/bin/dash (or whatever the full pathname used to invoke dash is) into dash's environment, which in turn sets it to the last argument of the previous command, but as it has been exported, it spills into the environment of the next command. Currently, this can be mitigated by executing `unset _` in $ENV, but this would not be a problem if $_ were treated as a special variable, as its value in the environment would remain unmodified.