Remove all global variables?

[decibel]

Any objection to converting all variables to being local? That would make sourcing the file a lot safer.

At first glance, I think this would mostly amount to passing token to a bunch of functions as an argument, and having them echo it back, though maybe you know of a better way.

I guess the other option is to just declare it as local in parse() and leave it to be set and read by everything else as done today...

[dominictarr]

that should be fine - although, I got some pull requests from @aidanhs to make this work with the standard sh (not bash). @aidanhs what are your thoughts?

[decibel]

On 1/7/16 12:03 AM, Dominic Tarr wrote:

that should be fine - although, I got some pull requests from @aidanhs
https://github.com/aidanhs to make this work with the standard sh (not
bash). @aidanhs https://github.com/aidanhs what are your thoughts?

Oh, interesting. I guess POSIX sh doesn't support local?

It might be possible to have a $use_local that's either empty or set to
'local', and then instead of doing

local my_var

do

$use_local my_var

Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX
Experts in Analytics, Data Architecture and PostgreSQL
Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com

[aidanhs]

local is fine in posix shell (if you're on Ubuntu you can get such a shell by running dash). However, you're not allowed multiple declarations on one line - see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh#local

[Artoria2e5]

Well, not really. local is not a part of POSIX shell command language; dash only added it because it is a nice to have. The no multiple per line thing should be tested with a recent version of dash.

[aidanhs]

@Artoria2e5 huh, I guess that'll teach me to verify things before I believe them.

I've tested multi-var local on both dash and busybox sh and they both seem fine, so I guess it's probably ok to rely on it.

[Artoria2e5]

The thing about dash and its busybox derivative is that local and export act a bit like a command: in bash doing local a=$b is perfectly fine, but in dash the $b part undergoes splitting and globbing, so you have to double-quote it to be sure. We do have an unquoted expansion in awk_egrep here.

[mikhirev]

Local variables in POSIX shell? Seriously? It is not in standard, so it is not POSIX. (Well, local is in standard, but only as a reserved word with unspecified behavior.) It is not implemented in ksh93, for example. And ksh93 is used as /bin/sh in Solaris 11. So if you are interested in portability, forget local variables.