A bashism a week: maths

You've probably already done some basic maths in shell scripts, but do you know what else you can actually do?

Pick at least 4 operations that you can do in bashisms-free shell scripts:

$((n+1))
$((n>8))
$((n^4))
$((--n))
$((n*=5))
$((n++))
$((n==1?2:3))

The POSIX:2001 standard defines the arithmetic expansion requirements, which leads us to selecting all of the above operations except two:

$((--n))
$((n++))

"--" and "++" are not required to be implemented, and in some cases they may lead to unexpected results, such as the following:


$ bash -c 'n=1; echo $((++n))'
2
$ dash -c 'n=1; echo $((++n))'
1


Remember, if you rely on any non-standard behaviour or feature make sure you document it and, if feasible, check for it at run-time.

Faster, more stable and new opportunities

A new version of the code behind http.debian.net was deployed a few days ago. It has proved to be far more stable, faster, and scalable compared to the previous mod_perl-based deployment.

There were a couple of glitches during the earlier roll-out for IPv6 users, fixed thanks to the reports by Cyril Brulebois, Michael Stapelberg and Robert Drake.

What's behind?
The redirector is now a plack application (with no middlewere) running under the Starman server with an apache fronted. Requests are processed faster than before and there mod_perl-induced system overload is finally gone.

The redirector is now easier to test and develop. Deploying the live instance is not yet fully streamlined, but it has seen a lot of improvement. Some important changes to the way the redirector works are already on their way to see the light and I am going to be announcing them when they do. Fork the repository and hack a few changes, contributions are welcome :)

It's probably time to move it under debian.org, and finish making it the default everywhere. It's even made its way into the installation manual.

A bashism a week: dangerous exports

As a user of a shell you have most likely had the need to export a variable to another process; i.e. set/modify an environment variable.

Now, how do you stop exporting an environment variable? can you export anything else?

The bash shell offers the -n option of the export built-in, claiming it "remove[s] the export property". However, this feature is not part of the POSIX:2001 standard and is, therefore, a bashism.

A portable way to stop exporting an environment variable is to unset it. E.g. the effect of "export MY_VAR=foo" can be reverted by calling "unset MY_VAR" - surely enough, this will also destroy the content of the variable.

An equivalent could then be:

# to stop exporting/"unexport" the MY_VAR environment variable:
my_var="$MY_VAR" ; unset MY_VAR ;
MY_VAR="$my_var" ; unset my_var ;

The above code will make a copy of the variable before destroying it and then restoring its content.

How about exporting other things? did you know that you can export shell functions?

With the bash shell, you can export a function with the -f parameter of the export built-in. Needless to say, this is a bashism. Its secret? it's just an environment variable with the name of the function and the rest of the function definition as its value.

Try this:

$ echo="() { /bin/echo 'have some bash' ; }" bash -c 'echo "Hello World!"'
have some bash

Yes, this means that if you can control the content of an environment variable passed to bash you can probably execute whatever code you want. It comes handy when you want to alter a script's behaviour without modifying the script itself.

Possibilities are endless thanks to bash's support for non-standard characters in function names. Functions with slashes can also be exported, for example:

/sbin/ifconfig() {
echo "some people say you should be using ip(1) instead" ;
}

Are you into bug hunting? export exec='() { echo mount this ; }'