[TriLUG] BASH oddity

[Paul G. Szabady]

Thanks all, I think this example/workaround will suffice for what I need
to do.

-- 
Paul
@ Thy Service

> On 2/21/06, G.Wolfe Woodbury <ggw at wolves.durham.nc.us> wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 06:02:10PM -0500, Paul G. Szabady wrote:
>> > That's what I thought, but other non-octal combinations work.
>> >
>> > IE
>> >
>> > [paul at at paul]$ declare -i dirx=88 ; echo $dirx
>> > 88
>> > [paul at at paul]$
>>
>> The leading '0' digit trigger the octal interpretation.  There are
>> special cases in the code for 09 but 08 seems to have escaped someone's
>> notice.  The library spec says that 08 should be correctly interpreted.
>>
>> might be worth filing a bug with your distributions bug site.
>
> Not sure which library spec you're talking about, but bash seems to be
> working as designed if it rejects a constant of 08, and if its
> accepting 09 then THAT's a bug.
>
> Bash on my Ubuntu/debian system doesn't like either 08 or 09 as an
> arithmethic literal.  And I don't believe that it should.  Here's the
> relevant paragraph  from man bash:
>
> Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal numbers.  A
> leading 0x or 0X  denotes  hexadecimal. Otherwise, numbers take the
> form [base#]n, where base is a decimal number between 2 and 64
> representin the arithmetic base, and n is a number in that base.  If
> base# is omitted, then base 10 is  used.   The digits  greater  than
> 9  are represented by the lowercase letters, the uppercase letters, @,
> and _, in that order.  If base is less than or equal to 36, lowercase
> and uppercase letters may  be  used  inter$B!>(Bchangeably to represent
> numbers between 10 and 35.
>
> So here's a way to get around the problem:
>
> rick at bill:~$ declare -i dirx=10#$(date +%V)
> rick at bill:~$ echo $dirx
> 8
>
> declare -i dirx=10#$(date +%V)
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