Re: weird behaviour of quotes in dash variable assignments
On Mon 21 Sep 2020 at 08:18:52 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 07:55:45AM -0400, Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
> > '…' and "…" are known as neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter,
> > dumb, or ASCII quotation marks.
> >
> > ‘…’ and “…” are known as typographic, curly, curved, book, or smart
> > quotation marks.
>
> Yes. This is one of the possible causes for the behavior the OP was
> reporting. But if this is true, then it reveals that they were lying
> when they claimed that the scripts were the same on both servers.
>
> […]
>
> To beat a dead horse some more, if *this* was the OP's problem, then they
> told multiple lies about it. They did not paste the actual failing line
> from the failing script (probably retyped it instead), and they did not
> ACTUALLY COMPARE the two scripts to see whether they were different,
> instead simply ASSUMING that the two scripts were identical, even though
> they very clearly weren't.
>
> An actual troubleshooting would have done something like using md5sum
> on the script on each machine, and pasting the md5sum commands (including
> the full script pathname) and their output to the mailing list. Openness.
>
> Or, hell, even "ls -l /full/pathname" would probably have revealed that
> the scripts were not the same SIZE. That would also have shown immediately
> that the scripts were not "the same".
I think we should apply Hanlon's razor rather than saying the OP lied.
After all, "compare" means diff or cmp to us, whereas many might just
use their eyeballs. And we all know that authors are the worst people
to check their own work. Proof-reading is a special skill.
Even their fix is poorly described. Did they just type the quotes back
in with an editor, in which case there's no guarantee that the scripts
are identical between machines, or did they transfer a working script
to the failing machine? The best line is save until last: "I certainly
didn't update anything on either server...". Well, yes, that's
*precisely* what you did: you updated the script.
Cheers,
David.
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