Re: about the local not-on-every-function-separately var issue

[Chet Ramey]

On 3/22/21 9:38 PM, Dale R. Worley wrote:

> In my experience, a common reason is that the documentation does not
> concentrate in one place that users are certain to read, a complete,
> clear description of the situation.  For instance, you give a complete,
> clear description:
>
>      Bash uses "dynamic scope" when it expands variables.  This means that
>      it looks first in the current functions local variables; if the variable
>      isn't found there, it looks in the caller's local variables, and then
>      in the caller's caller's local variables, and so on, until it reaches
>      the global scope.

Well, there is this in the FUNCTIONS section of the man page:

"The  shell  uses  dynamic  scoping  to  control a variable's visibility
 within functions.  With dynamic scoping, visible  variables  and  their
 values  are a result of the sequence of function calls that caused exe-
 cution to reach the current function.  The value of a variable  that  a
 function  sees  depends on its value within its caller, if any, whether
 that caller is the "global" scope or another shell function.   This  is
 also  the  value  that  a local variable declaration "shadows", and the
 value that is restored when the function returns.

 For example, if a variable var is declared as local in function  func1,
 and  func1  calls  another  function func2, references to var made from
 within func2 will resolve to the local variable var from func1, shadow-
 ing any global variable named var."



--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/