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From: dws@margay.cs.wisc.edu (DaviD W. Sanderson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Wierd shell bug could be useful
Summary: useful, but not a bug
Message-ID: <1991Jan30.211715.16547@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 30 Jan 91 21:17:15 GMT
References: <618@tndsyd.oz>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu (The News)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 31

In article <618@tndsyd.oz> root@tndsyd.oz (the main man) writes:
>Try this out:
>	$ echo > foo '
>	> garbage
>	> ...
>	> '
[...]
>A user friendly bug !!!

It isn't a bug.  The shell allows i/o redirections to occur anywhere on
the command line (it even says so in the man page), and it also allows
multiline quoted strings.  So the example you gave was simply an echo
of a single quoted string redirected into a file.  Putting the
redirection in the middle is unusual but perfectly legal.  You could
equally well have given

	$ > foo echo '		or	$ echo '
	junk				junk
	'				' > foo

Note that if you substitute "cat" for "echo" you will get an error from
cat because presumably cat will not be able to find a file whose name
is given by the multiline quoted string.  Unless you like pathological
file names! :-)
-- 
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      / __\  U N S H I N E	           DaviD W. Sanderson
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