Re: [Help-bash] Why COLUMNS is not available, when -i is set?

[Eduardo A . Bustamante López]

This seems to be a bug. (I'm Cc-ing bug-bash)

When you set the 'i' flag as an option to bash, it works:

    address@hidden ~ % bash -O checkwinsize -ic 'echo "$COLUMNS"'
    136

This is because of the special treatment that 'i' gets in shell.c. There are
some tests there for the value of 'forced_interactive' (the variable set by -i
), and these call init_interactive() when forced_interactive is true (there are
certain variations, but these don't matter much).

But, when you set the 'i' flag via the set builtin, no such special treatment
is given to that change. It just calls change_flag(flag_name, ...) and it
assumes it did its job correctly.

    address@hidden ~ % bash -O checkwinsize -c 'set -i; echo "$COLUMNS"'
    (empty)

So, I see two options:
- We call init_interactive() for the 'i' flag in set.
- Disallow set [-+]i

It's a mess to be able to change the interactive flag like that with set -i/set
+i though, and it will probably lead to more bugs. On the other hand, that's
not a real reason to disallow it. It's just more work.

But, either way, I consider that a bug.

Now, this is by no means a complete patch, but, it shows where the bug probably
lies:

    address@hidden ~ % ~/local/src/bash/bash -O checkwinsize -c 'set -i; echo 
"$COLUMNS"'
    136

I've attached it.

set-i.patch
Description: Text document