Re: inconsistent treatment of backslash-bang

[Paul Jarc]

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.nz> wrote:
> Chet Ramey wrote:
>> I already explained that bash follows csh as closely as possible
>> in its history expansion implementation.
>
> Well, it doesn't:

Sure it does: in your examples, bash tries history expansion in
exactly the same cases as tcsh.  Where they differ is in escape/quote
handling, since bash comes from the Bourne shell tradition, and tcsh
comes from the completely incompatible C shell tradition.  It's not at
all surprising that merging behaviors from these two disparate shells
would result in some rought edges.

> Either \ acts as an escape or it doesn't

You would like that to be true, as would lots of other people.  But
the current behavior is too well-entrenched to change now without
breaking lots of people's expectations, based on bash's past behavior.
It's not going to change.  You are free to patch your own copy of
bash, or use a different shell that aims for self-consistency over
historical consistency.


paul