Re: Shopt to change default connector to '&&'

[Hugues Morisset]

Hello,
Thanks for the responses,

> But... why?  What does your change allow you to do, which you couldn't
> do previously?

> An unmodified bash *already* lets you write code like this:

> if cmd1 && cmd2 && cmd3; then
>    cmd4 && cmd5
> fi

> It also lets you write code like this:

> if cmd1; cmd2; cmd3; then
>    cmd4; cmd5
> fi

> These two pieces of code have different meanings, of course.  The author
> of the script gets to choose which one is desired.

> Maybe I'm just missing something here.  Can you please explain in a little
> bit more detail?

Consider the following example:

cmd1
if cmd2; then
   cmd4 || cmd7
cmd5
fi
cmd6

To write it more sturdily, it would translate to something like this

cmd1 \
&& if cmd2; then
   { cmd4 || cmd7; } \
   && cmd5;
fi \
&& cmd6 ;

It imposes the author to be extra explicit, which I believe is harder
to write and read.

It's true that an unmodified bash already allows to explicitly write
'&&' or ';' to express desired behavior
This patch give the user the choice to use '&&' as a default command
separator when one is not explicitly given

(with newlines)



> And how is it meaningfully different from set -e?

As I understand there is a lot of quirks to set -e, one of which is a
command might be executed even if

the previous one failed.

It would be nice to have a way to express that a command is to be executed only
if the previous one succedded (which '&&' does) but without having to
write it everywhere.


The purpose of the patch is mainly to ease the writting of sturdy
scripts and make life easier.

Regards,

Hugues