This patch makes msh handle variable expansion within backticks more
correctly.
Current behaviour (wrong):
--------------------------
BusyBox v1.00-rc3 (2004.08.26-11:51+0000) Built-in shell (msh)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
$ A='`echo hello`'
$ echo $A
`echo hello`
$ echo `echo $A`
hello
$
New behaviour (correct):
------------------------
BusyBox v1.00-rc3 (2004.08.26-11:51+0000) Built-in shell (msh)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
$ A='`echo hello`'
$ echo $A
`echo hello`
$ echo `echo $A`
`echo hello`
$
The current behaviour (wrong according to standards) was actually my
fault. msh handles backticks by executing a subshell (which makes it
work on MMU-less systems). Executing a subshell makes it hard to only
expand variables once in the parent. Therefore I export all variables
that will be expanded within the backticks and let the subshell handle
the expansion instead.
The bug was found while searching for security leaks in CGI-scripts.
Current behaviour of msh makes it easy to expand backticks by mistake
in $QUERY_STRING. I recommend appling the patch before release of bb
1.00.
/Jonas
A question was posted a month ago by Mark Alamo to see if others had
problems with sourcing subscripts within msh. We asked his firm to fix the
msh.c bug he described because we didn't have enough time to do it
ourselves.
When msh.c is executing a compound statement and there is a . command to
source another script file, msh.c will not execute the subscript until it's
completed executing the rest of the compound statement.
His example was this:
Echo "Start" ; . ./subA; echo "mid" ; . ./subB ; echo "end"
subA and subB execute AFTER end is printed in reverse order. The same is
true if the sourced files are inside an if else fi, case esac, or any
compound statement.
Attached is a patch to msh.c. It fixes the problem. Cd to the root of your
busybox tree and execute "patch -p1 < msh.c.patch"
Unfortunately, I won't have more time to work on this so I hope that there
aren't any problems!
Michael Leibow
Senior Software Engineer
Belkin Corporation
This is a bulk spelling fix patch against busybox-1.00-pre10.
If anyone gets a corrupted copy (and cares), let me know and
I will make alternate arrangements.
Erik - please apply.
Authors - please check that I didn't corrupt any meaning.
Package importers - see if any of these changes should be
passed to the upstream authors.
I glossed over lots of sloppy capitalizations, missing apostrophes,
mixed American/British spellings, and German-style compound words.
What is "pretect redefined for test" in cmdedit.c?
Good luck on the 1.00 release!
- Larry
handles all the basic stuff (for, case/esac, while, if/then/else), and
is very small (adds just 38k on x86). It is not as rigorously correct
about Bourne semantics as bash, but for most things it is quite
workable. There is still some work to be done to further shrink it (it
has its own globbing functions instead of using the libc ones, for
example), but it is quite usable as is.
-Erik
