On 24/07/2024 20:50, Greg Wooledge wrote:
Everyone skips over the sentence that begins with "Omitting the colon".
Every time we try to tell Chet, "Hey, man, please add examples that
show BOTH syntaxes", he blows us off, because this is the way POSIX
documents it. If it's good enough for POSIX, then it must be good
enough for bash, right?[1]
For a long time I was believing that ${X=Y} is just an obsolete and less
strict form of ${X:=Y} due to the way it is documented in BASH. Once I
needed to distinguish empty an unset values. First hits in search engine
results gave me impression that people just did not care. Fortunately I
spotted <https://stackoverflow.com/a/16753536> with both variants (a
quote from POSIX). I agree that colon vs. no colon should be documented
in a more prominent way.
