And here is another interesting thing inspired by this thread.
I always thought the "colon-free" versions of the P.E. was a bash-ism, but
experimentation shows that it works in "dash" as well. And "man dash" contains
the following text:
In the parameter expansions shown previously, use of the colon in the format
re-
sults in a test for a parameter that is unset or null; omission of the
colon re-
sults in a test for a parameter that is only unset.
So, is this POSIX, or just a dash-extension?
=================================================================================
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I always read the replies via the web archive, so CC'ing to me is unnecessary.
Note that they always end up in my Spam file anyway, so it is annoying to have
to
periodically clean that out.
