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From: mer6g@virginia.acc.virginia.edu (Marc Rouleau)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: sh bug
Message-ID: <467@virginia.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: Mon, 26-Oct-87 10:00:41 EST
Article-I.D.: virginia.467
Posted: Mon Oct 26 10:00:41 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 29-Oct-87 23:48:52 EST
Reply-To: mer6g@virginia.UUCP (Marc Rouleau)
Organization: University of Va., Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 25

References:


On our 3b2, 3b5, and 3b15 AT&T systems running SYSV.2 and SYSV.3, sh does
something rather unfortunate when certain built-in functions fail.  For
example,

	cd nowhere || echo 'cd failure'

where ``nowhere'' is nonexistent does not (as you might expect) cause ``cd
failure'' to be echoed to the screen.  The expected error message is produced
and then . . . nothing, a new prompt.

This became a problem for us when a cron script which checked for the existence
of a directory in this (admittedly crude) fashion started breaking.  The
script chokes and dies whenever the cd fails.  It seems to happen with other
built-in functions as well; for instance, the ``.'' function does the same
thing when the file given it does not exist.

Luckily, ``test'' works just fine, so we can run around this problem.

BTW, ksh handles all this stuff correctly.

Does anyone have a fix?

-- 
Marc Rouleau		University of Virginia      Academic Computing Center
mer6g@virginia.edu	mer6g@virginia [bitnet]	    	    ...virginia!mer6g