Re: [PATCH] Generic mechanism to detect shell features

[Eric Sunshine]

On 12 Jan 2004 21:24:01 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Eric Sunshine <address@hidden> writes:
> > In other words, you can do the following without crashing the
> > currently running shell:
> > if (run shell-function test) 2>/dev/null; then
> >     # success
> > fi
> Surely that won't work reliably with traditional shells that can't
> even parse the contents of "run shell-function test".  I'd think that
> if they can't parse the subexpression then they won't parse the
> containing expression, and they may just give up on the entire script.

That's a good point.

> We'd have better luck with something like this:
> if (eval '(case a in a) exit 0;; b) exit 1;; esac)') 2>/dev/null
> then echo ok
> else echo fail
> fi
> This would be far more likely to do the right thing, since any syntax
> error would be well-protected inside a subshell, and would not be
> parsed until the subshell is entered.

Yes, eval seems like a good idea.  Another option is to export the check to  
an external file and use '.' to invoke it in a sub shell.  For instance:

cat >conftest.inc <<_ASEOF
...function test...
_ASEOF
if ( . conftest.inc ) 2>/dev/null ; then
  echo "ok"
fi
rm -f conftest.inc

I have run tests with the eval and the '.' technique, and they both seem  
like winners.  It seems that either one should work correctly.

-- ES