mint-bash weirdness
D. Hugh Redelmeier
hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Fri Jan 3 22:22:32 UTC 2014
| From: Giles Orr <gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
| function dpkgs () { dpkg-query -W
| --showformat='${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -n; }
|
| No problem with Debian, I just drop the
| function into /etc/bash.bashrc as usual. But on Mint it just prints:
|
| Size
| Size
| Size
[all the following is unreliable guess-work.]
Shell variables don't normally had - in them. Try the following:
echo ${yuck-zop}
That should print "zop". I think that this is an undocumented
backward compatability feature of bash. See sh(1), page 159, in
<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol1.pdf>
Now your usage should not involve shell parameter substitution but
dpkg-query --showformat substitution. But if the single quotes were
somehow eaten, the shell would do the substitution and "Size" would be
printed.
If you do the command
set | less
and search for dpkgs, you should see what definition bash has.
I see:
dpkgs ()
{
dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -n
}
which looks correct (see the quotes?).
I suspect that on the problematic system (Mint), those quotes are gone.
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