BASH’s compat31 option

by Richard Li on 1/09/2009 Labels:
Several of my bash scripts failed when I migrated from Debian to Gentoo almost one year ago for the different ways bash interpretes commands like this: [[ "$x" =~ '^[0-9]$' ]]. This command succeeded in Debian when $x is a single digit, but failed in Gentoo. I had to remove the single quotes surround the regular expression to make it work in Gentoo.

Today I finally found the reason: I was using bash 3.1 in Debian and 3.2 in Gentoo. Bash 3.2 by default mandates that regular expressions not be surrounded by quotes; however, the behavior can be modified using shopt -s compat31.

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousMay 8, 2015 at 12:19 AM

    what are the bad effects of using compat31 options as:
    shopt -s compat31.

    ReplyDelete

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