On Sat, 30 Aug 2025, 02:26 Chet Ramey, <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: > There is no specification for how it behaves;
I'll buy that when the shell is in POSIX mode, but when talking about Bash's extensions to POSIX, there's never been a full specification separate from the source code there is no expectation that > it will remain unchanged in the future That's your expectation, but it's not many users' expectation, when they have decades of experience to the contrary. You might say that the source code is always the official reference; I > don't buy it here. Not the source code per se, but its behaviour. Most of what I initially learned about Bash was by reading the manual, then systematically experimenting to establish corner cases. There wasn't an alternative if I wanted to write reliable scripts back then; there were far too many holes in the documentation. "It was never documented" is a pretty weak argument when significant parts of the shell's seemingly intended behaviour are STILL undocumented. So users will *of course* regard the detectable behaviours of the source code as the authoritative language definition, whether or not they describe it in those terms. -Martin
