sh(1) command substitution and here documents

William E. Davidsen Jr davidsen at steinmetz.ge.com
Thu Jun 23 03:27:23 AEST 1988


In article <1254 at cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> jack at cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu.UUCP (Jack Nelson) writes:

| What I would like to do is incorporate this calculation result into a shell
| variable using the here document:
| 	#!/bin/sh
| 	var=`bc <<End
| 	scale=2
| 	3 / 4
| 	End
| 	`
| But this doesn't work; an error message "cannot open /tmp/sh01383"
| always is produced, both on 4.3 and 2.10 systems.  Is there a way
| to do this?  Can one deduce this behavior from the manual?

  This was fixed after V7.  It works in SysIII sh, SysV sh, ksh, and sh
on Sun (which is mostly sysV I believe).  It fails on V7 and every BSD
version I could try.  Since Berkeley hasn't fixed it (and some similar
problems) perhaps you can get ksh. 

-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me



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