Re: Problem with autoconf 2.57?

[Paul Eggert]

"David Corlette" <address@hidden> writes:

> What I don't understand exactly 
> is that you don't have your sed command quoted, e.g. I would expect 
> that you would need to do:
> sed 'y/l/p/;s/e/i/g'
> to prevent the shell from interpreting the ';' as a "end of shell 
> command" character, and the s/e/i/g as a new shell command.

You're misunderstanding how shell quoting works.  The ';' appears only
inside a quoted string, so it doesn't end the containing shell command.

For example:

semicolon=";"
echo $semicolon

should output a semicolon.  You can't end a shell command by
interpolating a semicolon from a shell expansion.

> $ echo "hello" | sed 'y/l/p/;s/e/i/g' 
> heppo
> under QNX (which I suspect is the result I'm seeing in the ntpd 
> compile).

That's clearly a bug, yes.