Re: [Help-bash] pass command to script

[Chet Ramey]

On 4/25/19 3:00 PM, Eric Blake wrote:

> Am I recalling correctly that at one point, there was an experiment made
> where the shell was patched to export an environment variable describing
> which portions of the command line were typed directly vs. which parts
> were quoted or otherwise resulted from expansions, so that the invoked
> application could read that environment variable to reconstruct a
> properly quoted command line that would have the same behavior?  

No, that's not quite correct, and man, that was a long time ago.

The variable was introduced in bash-2.0. It was named something like
"_<pid>_GNU_nonoption_argv_flags_" where <pid> was the pid of the child
process about to be executed, and it was basically a bitmap corresponding
to the words in argv with a `1' meaning the word was the result of pathname
expansion and 0 if not.

My notes from way back then indicate that it was for Roland's custom glibc
getopt(). It finally disappeared in bash-4.3 (January, 2013), since all the
code that might possibly have used it was long dead.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    address@hidden    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/