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From: cosell@BBN-LABS-B.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Bug in the Bourne shell
Message-ID: <1671@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Jul-84 09:32:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.1671
Posted: Fri Jul  6 09:32:27 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Jul-84 00:39:55 EDT
Lines: 17

From:  Bernie Cosell <cosell@BBN-LABS-B.ARPA>

AFter struggling some in trying to debug a shell script, I discovered that the
source of my trouble was what seems to be a bug in the Bourne shell.  Both our
4.2 and our V7 Bourne shells act the same way:

The problem is with '"$@"'.  This construct is claimed to expand to
'"$1" "$2" ... "$n"'.  Unfortunately, it seems just to throw away null args.
That is, if your args are, say, "a", "b c ", and "d", then, as I would have
expected, when I do 'nextprogram "$@"', nextprogram correctly is fed three
args, the second of which is "b c ".  Just right.... BUT... if your args are
"a", "", and "d", then when you do 'nextprogram "$@"', nextprogram ends up with
only TWO args - the "a" and the "d", with the null arg just gone.

Thanks
   /Bernie
   cosell@bbn-unix