Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Gary_D_Walborn
From: Gary_D_Walborn@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Arp 1.3 Problems/Features
Message-ID: <20107@cup.portal.com>
Date: 4 Jul 89 04:26:41 GMT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 39

I have recently encountered some problems with AShell and grep.  I think
that these problems may be 'features' of AShell.  First, it seems that the
scanner has been written to allow ')' and '(' and other strange characters
in environment variables.  This may be the desired function, but raises
havoc with some other commands after command line expansion.  In particular,
I have been attempting to use 'beval' with a command line variable 'foo'.

1>foo=4
1>echo $foo
4
1>echo $foo+3

1>echo "$foo+3"
Echo: Unmatched quotes

It seems that it would be wise to limit environment variables to A-Z,0-9 and
(possibly) underscore so that "$foo+3" would expand to "4+3".
I have also encountered a problem with the 'expansion' of *.  For example:

1>echo "^.*$"
^.$

What happened to the "*"? This is a real problem when using grep as the
asterisk is frequently used in regular expressions.  In what may be
a related problem, I noticed the following peculiarity:

1>grep snake test
File test:
snake

1>grep "snake" test
1>

Ashell brings a whole new level of functionality to the CLI environment
but the execution seems to be somewhat flawed.   Any comment on the
observed peculiarities would be appreciated.


Gary D. Walborn