Wandering Thoughts archives

A Bourne shell irritation

I was bitten by this today, so I am going to grump about it. Today's irritation with the Bourne shell is that the following is illegal syntax:

echo hi &;

This probably looks peculiar and silly, so let me give a real example that is also illegal:

for i in *watch; do nohup ./$i >/dev/null 2>&1 </dev/null &; done

So is '; ;', and for the same reason: in the Bourne shell, you can't have empty 'simple commands', and both '&' and ';' are command terminators.

(The status of newline is somewhat confusing; the best explanation may be the original V7 sh manpage, which calls it an optional command delimiter. It cannot be a simple command terminator, because that would mean multiple blank lines would be a syntax error.)

This becomes more irritating when you write command lines with multiple backgroundings in them, for example:

foo & bar & baz & wait

Speaking for myself, that makes my eyes bleed. I find it much more readable and easier to write:

foo &; bar &; baz &; wait

(I think a lot of the eye-bleeding is that 'a & b' is very similar to the much more common 'a && b', yet does something radically different.)

I have no idea why Bourne decided to be so nit-picky about this aspect of the shell's grammar, but I suspect it mirrors some bit of Algol.

(As an aside, I note that the original V7 Bourne shell manpage is a marvel of packing a great deal of information into not much space and being reasonably lucid in the process.)