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Releases

For code examples, see EXAMPLES.md and share/doc/modernish/examples

modernish – harness the shell

  • Sick of quoting hell and split/glob pitfalls?
  • Tired of brittle shell scripts going haywire and causing damage?
  • Mystified by line noise commands like [, [[, (( ?
  • Is scripting basic things just too hard?
  • Ever wish that find were a built-in shell loop?
  • Do you want your script to work on nearly any shell on any Unix-like OS?

Modernish is a library for shell script programming which provides features like safer variable and command expansion, new language constructs for loop iteration, and much more. Modernish programs are shell programs; the new constructs are mixed with shell syntax so that the programmer can take advantage of the best of both.

There is no compiled code to install, as modernish is written entirely in the shell language. It can be deployed in embedded or multi-user systems in which new binary executables may not be introduced for security reasons, and is portable among numerous shell implementations. The installer can also bundle a reduced copy of the library with your scripts, so they can run portably with a known version of modernish without requiring prior installation.

Join us and help breathe some new life into the shell! We are looking for testers, early adopters, and developers to join us. Download the latest release or check out the very latest development code from the master branch. Read through the documentation below. Play with the example scripts and write your own. Try to break the library and send reports of breakage.

Table of contents

Getting started

Run install.sh and follow instructions, choosing your preferred shell and install location. After successful installation you can run modernish shell scripts and write your own. Run uninstall.sh to remove modernish.

Both the install and uninstall scripts are interactive by default, but support fully automated (non-interactive) operation as well. Command line options are as follows:

install.sh [ -n ] [ -s shell ] [ -f ] [ -P pathspec ] [ -d installroot ] [ -D prefix ] [ -B scriptfile ... ]

  • -n: non-interactive operation
  • -s: specify default shell to execute modernish
  • -f: force unconditional installation on specified shell
  • -P: specify an alternative DEFPATH for the installation (be careful; usually not recommended)
  • -d: specify root directory for installation
  • -D: extra destination directory prefix (for packagers)
  • -B: bundle modernish with your scripts (-D required, -n implied), see Appendix F

uninstall.sh [ -n ] [ -f ] [ -d installroot ]

  • -n: non-interactive operation
  • -f: delete */modernish directories even if files left
  • -d: specify root directory of modernish installation to uninstall

Two basic forms of a modernish program

In the simple form, modernish is added to a script written for a specific shell. In the portable form, your script is shell-agnostic and may run on any shell that can run modernish.

Simple form

The simplest way to write a modernish program is to source modernish as a dot script. For example, if you write for bash:

#! /bin/bash
. modernish
use safe
use sys/base
...your program starts here...

The modernish use command load modules with optional functionality. The safe module initialises the safe mode. The sys/base module contains modernish versions of certain basic but non-standardised utilities (e.g. readlink, mktemp, which), guaranteeing that modernish programs all have a known version at their disposal. There are many other modules as well. See Modules for more information.

The above method makes the program dependent on one particular shell (in this case, bash). So it is okay to mix and match functionality specific to that particular shell with modernish functionality.

(On zsh, there is a way to integrate modernish with native zsh scripts. See Appendix E.)

Portable form

The most portable way to write a modernish program is to use the special generic hashbang path for modernish programs. For example:

#! /usr/bin/env modernish
#! use safe
#! use sys/base
...your program begins here...

For portability, it is important there is no space after env modernish; NetBSD and OpenBSD consider trailing spaces part of the name, so env will fail to find modernish.

A program in this form is executed by whatever shell the user who installed modernish on the local system chose as the default shell. Since you as the programmer can't know what shell this is (other than the fact that it passed some rigorous POSIX compliance testing executed by modernish), a program in this form must be strictly POSIX compliant – except, of course, that it should also make full use of the rich functionality offered by modernish.

Note that modules are loaded in a different way: the use commands are part of hashbang comment (starting with #! like the initial hashbang path). Only such lines that immediately follow the initial hashbang path are evaluated; even an empty line in between causes the rest to be ignored. This special way of pre-loading modules is needed to make any aliases they define work reliably on all shells.

Interactive use

Modernish is primarily designed to enhance shell programs/scripts, but also offers features for use in interactive shells. For instance, the new repeat loop construct from the var/loop module can be quite practical to repeat an action x times, and the safe module on interactive shells provides convenience functions for manipulating, saving and restoring the state of field splitting and globbing.

To use modernish on your favourite interactive shell, you have to add it to your .profile, .bashrc or similar init file.

Important: Upon initialising, modernish adapts itself to other settings, such as the locale. It also removes certain aliases that may keep modernish from initialising properly. So you have to organise your .profile or similar file in the following order:

  • first, define general system settings (PATH, locale, etc.);
  • then, . modernish and use any modules you want;
  • then define anything that may depend on modernish, and set your aliases.

Non-interactive command line use

After installation, the modernish command can be invoked as if it were a shell, with the standard command line options from other shells (such as -c to specify a command or script directly on the command line), plus some enhancements. The effect is that the shell chosen at installation time will be run enhanced with modernish functionality. It is not possible to use modernish as an interactive shell in this way.

Usage:

  1. modernish [ --use=module | shelloption ... ] [ scriptfile ] [ arguments ]
  2. modernish [ --use=module | shelloption ... ] -c [ script [ me-name [ arguments ] ] ]
  3. modernish --test [ testoption ... ]
  4. modernish [ --version | --help ]

In the first form, the script in the file scriptfile is loaded and executed with any arguments assigned to the positional parameters.

In the second form, -c executes the specified modernish script, optionally with the me-name assigned to $ME and the arguments assigned to the positional parameters.

The --use option pre-loads any given modernish modules before executing the script. The module argument to each specified --use option is split using standard shell field splitting. The first field is the module name and any further fields become arguments to that module's initialisation routine.

Any given short-form or long-form shelloptions are set or unset before executing the script. Both POSIX shell options and shell-specific options are supported, depending on the shell executing modernish. Using the shell option -e or -o errexit is an error, because modernish does not support it and would break.

The --test option runs the regression test suite and exits. This verifies that the modernish installation is functioning correctly. See Appendix B for more information.

The --version and --help options output the relative information and exit.

Non-interactive usage examples

  • Count to 10 using a basic loop:
    modernish --use=var/loop -c 'LOOP for i=1 to 10; DO putln "$i"; DONE'
  • Run a portable-form modernish program using zsh and enhanced-prompt xtrace:
    zsh /usr/local/bin/modernish -o xtrace /path/to/program.sh

Shell capability detection

Modernish includes a battery of shell feature, quirk and bug detection tests, each of which is given a special capability ID. See Appendix A for a list of shell capabilities that modernish currently detects, as well as further general information on the capability detection framework.

thisshellhas is the central function of the capability detection framework. It not only tests for the presence of shell features/quirks/bugs, but can also detect specific shell built-in commands, shell reserved words, shell options (short or long form), and signals.

Modernish itself extensively uses capability detection to adapt itself to the shell it's running on. This is how it works around shell bugs and takes advantage of efficient features not all shells have. But any script using the library can do this in the same way, with the help of this function.

Test results are cached in memory, so repeated checks using thisshellhas are efficient and there is no need to avoid calling it to optimise performance.

Usage:

thisshellhas item ...

  • If item contains only ASCII capital letters A-Z, digits 0-9 or _, return the result status of the associated modernish capability detection test.
  • If item is any other ASCII word, check if it is a shell reserved word or built-in command on the current shell.
  • If item is -- (end-of-options delimiter), disable the recognition of operators starting with - for subsequent items.
  • If item starts with --rw= or --kw=, check if the identifier immediately following these characters is a shell reserved word (a.k.a. shell keyword).
  • If item starts with --bi=, similarly check for a shell built-in command.
  • If item starts with --sig=, check if the shell knows about a signal (usable by kill, trap, etc.) by the name or number following the =. If a number > 128 is given, the remainder of its division by 128 is checked. If the signal is found, its canonicalised signal name is left in the REPLY variable, otherwise REPLY is unset. (If multiple --sig= items are given and all are found, REPLY contains only the last one.)
  • If item is -o followed by a separate word, check if this shell has a long-form shell option by that name.
  • If item is any other letter or digit preceded by a single -, check if this shell has a short-form shell option by that character.
  • item can also be one of the following two operators.
    • --cache runs all external modernish shell capability tests that have not yet been run, causing the cache to be complete.
    • --show performs a --cache and then outputs all the IDs of positive results, one per line.

thisshellhas continues to process items until one of them produces a negative result or is found invalid, at which point any further items are ignored. So the function only returns successfully if all the items specified were found on the current shell. (To check if either one item or another is present, use separate thisshellhas invocations separated by the || shell operator.)

Exit status: 0 if this shell has all the items in question; 1 if not; 2 if an item was encountered that is not recognised as a valid identifier.

Note: The tests for the presence of reserved words, built-in commands, shell options, and signals are different from capability detection tests in an important way: they only check if an item by that name exists on this shell, and don't verify that it does the same thing as on another shell.

Names and identifiers

All modernish functions require portable variable and shell function names, that is, ones consisting of ASCII uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, and the underscore character _, and that don't begin with digit. For shell option names, the constraints are the same except a dash - is also accepted. An invalid identifier is generally treated as a fatal error.

Internal namespace

Function-local variables are not supported by the standard POSIX shell; only global variables are provided for. Modernish needs a way to store its internal state without interfering with the program using it. So most of the modernish functionality uses an internal namespace _Msh_* for variables, functions and aliases. All these names may change at any time without notice. Any names starting with _Msh_ should be considered sacrosanct and untouchable; modernish programs should never directly use them in any way. Of course this is not enforceable, but names starting with _Msh_ should be uncommon enough that no unintentional conflict is likely to occur.

Modernish system constants

Modernish provides certain constants (read-only variables) to make life easier. These include:

  • $MSH_VERSION: The version of modernish.
  • $MSH_PREFIX: Installation prefix for this modernish installation (e.g. /usr/local).
  • $MSH_MDL: Main modules directory.
  • $MSH_AUX: Main helper scripts directory.
  • $MSH_CONFIG: Path to modernish user configuration directory.
  • $ME: Path to the current program. Replacement for $0. This is necessary if the hashbang path #!/usr/bin/env modernish is used, or if the program is launched like sh /path/to/bin/modernish /path/to/script.sh, as these set $0 to the path to bin/modernish and not your program's path.
  • $MSH_SHELL: Path to the default shell for this modernish installation, chosen at install time (e.g. /bin/sh). This is a shell that is known to have passed all the modernish tests for fatal bugs. Cross-platform scripts should use it instead of hard-coding /bin/sh, because on some operating systems (NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris) /bin/sh is not POSIX compliant.
  • $SIGPIPESTATUS: The exit status of a command killed by SIGPIPE (a broken pipe). For instance, if you use grep something somefile.txt | more and you quit more before grep is finished, grep is killed by SIGPIPE and exits with that particular status. Hardened commands or functions may need to handle such a SIGPIPE exit specially to avoid unduly killing the program. The exact value of this exit status is shell-specific, so modernish runs a quick test to determine it at initialisation time.
    If SIGPIPE was set to ignore by the process that invoked the current shell, $SIGPIPESTATUS can't be detected and is set to the special value 99999. See also the description of the WRN_NOSIGPIPE ID for thisshellhas.
  • $DEFPATH: The default system path guaranteed to find compliant POSIX utilities, as given by getconf PATH.
  • $ERROR: A guaranteed unset variable that can be used to trigger an error that exits the (sub)shell, for instance: : "${4+${ERROR:?excess arguments}}" (error on 4 or more arguments)

Control character, whitespace and shell-safe character constants

POSIX does not provide for the quoted C-style escape codes commonly used in bash, ksh and zsh (such as $'\n' to represent a newline character), leaving the standard shell without a convenient way to refer to control characters. Modernish provides control character constants (read-only variables) with hexadecimal suffixes $CC01 .. $CC1F and $CC7F, as well as $CCe, $CCa, $CCb, $CCf, $CCn, $CCr, $CCt, $CCv (corresponding with printf backslash escape codes). This makes it easy to insert control characters in double-quoted strings.

More convenience constants, handy for use in bracket glob patterns for use with case or modernish match:

  • $CONTROLCHARS: All ASCII control characters.
  • $WHITESPACE: All ASCII whitespace characters.
  • $ASCIIUPPER: The ASCII uppercase letters A to Z.
  • $ASCIILOWER: The ASCII lowercase letters a to z.
  • $ASCIIALNUM: The ASCII alphanumeric characters 0-9, A-Z and a-z.
  • $SHELLSAFECHARS: Safe-list for shell-quoting.
  • $ASCIICHARS: The complete set of ASCII characters (minus NUL).

Usage examples:

# Use a glob pattern to check against control characters in a string:
	if str match "$var" "*[$CONTROLCHARS]*"; then
		putln "\$var contains at least one control character"
	fi
# Use '!' (not '^') to check for characters *not* part of a particular set:
	if str match "$var" "*[!$ASCIICHARS]*"; then
		putln "\$var contains at least one non-ASCII character" ;;
	fi
# Safely split fields at any whitespace, comma or slash (requires safe mode):
	use safe
	LOOP for --split=$WHITESPACE,/ field in $my_items; DO
		putln "Item: $field"
	DONE

Reliable emergency halt

The die function reliably halts program execution, even from within subshells, optionally printing an error message. Note that die is meant for an emergency program halt only, i.e. in situations were continuing would mean the program is in an inconsistent or undefined state. Shell scripts running in an inconsistent or undefined state may wreak all sorts of havoc. They are also notoriously difficult to terminate correctly, especially if the fatal error occurs within a subshell: exit won't work then. That's why die is optimised for killing all the program's processes (including subshells and external commands launched by it) as quickly as possible. It should never be used for exiting the program normally.

On interactive shells, die behaves differently. It does not kill or exit your shell; instead, it issues SIGINT to the shell to abort the execution of your running command(s), which is equivalent to pressing Ctrl+C. In addition, if die is invoked from a subshell such as a background job, it kills all processes belonging to that job, but leaves other running jobs alone.

Usage: die [ message ]

If the trap stack module is active, a special DIE pseudosignal can be trapped (using plain old trap or pushtrap) to perform emergency cleanup commands upon invoking die.

If the MSH_HAVE_MERCY variable is set in a script and die is invoked from a subshell, then die will only terminate the current subshell and its subprocesses and will not execute DIE traps, allowing the script to resume execution in the parent process. This is for use in special cases, such as regression tests, and is strongly discouraged for general use. Modernish unsets the variable on init so it cannot be inherited from the environment.

Low-level shell utilities

Outputting strings

The POSIX shell lacks a simple, straightforward and portable way to output arbitrary strings of text, so modernish adds two commands for this.

  • put prints each argument separated by a space, without a trailing newline.
  • putln prints each argument, terminating each with a newline character.

There is no processing of options or escape codes. (Modernish constants $CCn, etc. can be used to insert control characters in double-quoted strings. To process escape codes, use printf instead.)

The echo command is notoriously unportable and kind of broken, so is deprecated in favour of put and putln. Modernish does provide its own version of echo, but it is only activated for portable-form) scripts. Otherwise, the shell-specific version of echo is left intact. The modernish version of echo does not interpret any escape codes and supports only one option, -n, which, like BSD echo, suppresses the final newline. However, unlike BSD echo, if -n is the only argument, it is not interpreted as an option and the string -n is printed instead. This makes it safe to output arbitrary data using this version of echo as long as it is given as a single argument (using quoting if needed).

Legibility aliases: not, so, forever

Modernish sets three aliases that can help to make the shell language look slightly friendlier. Their use is optional.

not is a new synonym for !. They can be used interchangeably.

so is a command that tests if the previous command exited with a status of zero, so you can test the preceding command's success with if so or if not so.

forever is a new synonym for while :;. This allows simple infinite loops of the form: forever do stuff; done.

Enhanced exit

The exit command can be used as normal, but has gained capabilities.

Extended usage: exit [ -u ] [ status [ message ] ]

  • As per standard, if status is not specified, it defaults to the exit status of the command executed immediately prior to exit. Otherwise, it is evaluated as a shell arithmetic expression. If it is invalid as such, the shell exits immediately with an arithmetic error.
  • Any remaining arguments after status are combined, separated by spaces, and taken as a message to print on exit. The message shown is preceded by the name of the current program ($ME minus directories). Note that it is not possible to skip status while specifying a message.
  • If the -u option is given, and the shell function showusage is defined, that function is run in a subshell before exiting. It is intended to print a message showing how the command should be invoked. The -u option has no effect if the script has not defined a showusage function.
  • If status is non-zero, the message and the output of the showusage function are redirected to standard error.

chdir

chdir is a robust cd replacement for use in scripts.

The standard cd command is designed for interactive shells and appropriate to use there. However, for scripts, its features create serious pitfalls:

  • The $CDPATH variable is searched. A script may inherit a user's exported $CDPATH, so cd may change to an unintended directory.
  • cd cannot be used with arbitrary directory names (such as untrusted user input), as some operands have special meanings, even after --. POSIX specifies that - changes directory to $OLDPWD. On zsh (even in sh mode on zsh <= 5.7.1), numeric operands such as +12 or -345 represent directory stack entries. All such paths need escaping by prefixing ./.
  • Symbolic links in directory path components are not resolved by default, leaving a potential symlink attack vector.

Thus, robust and portable use of cd in scripts is unreasonably difficult. The modernish chdir function calls cd in a way that takes care of all these issues automatically: it disables $CDPATH and special operand meanings, and resolves symbolic links by default.

Usage: chdir [ -f ] [ -L ] [ -P ] [ -- ] directorypath

Normally, failure to change the present working directory to directorypath is a fatal error that ends the program. To tolerate failure, add the -f option; in that case, exit status 0 signifies success and exit status 1 signifies failure, and scripts should always check and handle exceptions.

The options -L (logical: don't resolve symlinks) and -P (physical: resolve symlinks) are the same as in cd, except that -P is the default. Note that on a shell with BUG_CDNOLOGIC (NetBSD sh), the -L option to chdir does nothing.

To use arbitrary directory names (e.g. directory names input by the user or other untrusted input) always use the -- separator that signals the end of options, or paths starting with - may be misinterpreted as options.

insubshell

The insubshell function checks if you're currently running in a subshell environment (usually called simply subshell).

A subshell is a copy of the parent shell that starts out as an exact duplicate (including non-exported variables, functions, etc.), except for traps. A new subshell is invoked by constructs like (parentheses), $(command substitutions), pipe|lines, and & (to launch a background subshell). Upon exiting a subshell, all changes to its state are lost.

This is not to be confused with a newly initialised shell that is merely a child process of the current shell, which is sometimes (confusingly and wrongly) called a "subshell" as well. This documentation avoids such a misleading use of the term.

Usage: insubshell [ -p | -u ]

This function returns success (0) if it was called from within a subshell and non-success (1) if not. One of two options can be given:

  • -p: Store the process ID (PID) of the current subshell or main shell in REPLY.
  • -u: Store an identifier in REPLY that is useful for determining if you've entered a subshell relative to a previously stored identifier. The content and format are unspecified and shell-dependent.

isset

isset checks if a variable, shell function or option is set, or has certain attributes. Usage:

  • isset varname: Check if a variable is set.
  • isset -v varname: Id.
  • isset -x varname: Check if variable is exported.
  • isset -r varname: Check if variable is read-only.
  • isset -f funcname: Check if a shell function is set.
  • isset -optionletter (e.g. isset -C): Check if shell option is set.
  • isset -o optionname: Check if shell option is set by long name.

Exit status: 0 if the item is set; 1 if not; 2 if the argument is not recognised as a valid identifier. Unlike most other modernish commands, isset does not treat an invalid identifier as a fatal error.

When checking a shell option, a nonexistent shell option is not an error, but returns the same result as an unset shell option. (To check if a shell option exists, use thisshellhas.

Note: just isset -f checks if shell option -f (a.k.a. -o noglob) is set, but with an extra argument, it checks if a shell function is set. Similarly, isset -x checks if shell option -x (a.k.a -o xtrace) is set, but isset -x varname checks if a variable is exported. If you use unquoted variable expansions here, make sure they're not empty, or the shell's empty removal mechanism will cause the wrong thing to be checked (even in the safe mode).

setstatus

setstatus manually sets the exit status $? to the desired value. The function exits with the status indicated. This is useful in conditional constructs if you want to prepare a particular exit status for a subsequent exit or return command to inherit under certain circumstances. The status argument is a parsed as a shell arithmetic expression. A negative value is treated as a fatal error. The behaviour of values greater than 255 is not standardised and depends on your particular shell.

Testing numbers, strings and files

The test/[ command is the bane of casual shell scripters. Even advanced shell programmers are frequently caught unaware by one of the many pitfalls of its arcane, hackish syntax. It attempts to look like shell grammar without being shell grammar, causing myriad problems (1, 2). Its -a, -o, ( and ) operators are inherently and fatally broken as there is no way to reliably distinguish operators from operands, so POSIX deprecates their use; however, most manual pages do not include this essential information, and even the few that do will not tell you what to do instead.

Ksh, zsh and bash offer a [[ alternative that fixes many of these problems, as it is integrated into the shell grammar. Nevertheless, it increases confusion, as entirely different grammar and quoting rules apply within [[...]] than outside it, yet many scripts end up using them interchangeably. It is also not available on all POSIX shells. (To make matters worse, Busybox ash has a false-friend [[ that is just an alias of [, with none of the shell grammar integration!)

Finally, the POSIX test/[ command is incompatible with the modernish "safe mode" which aims to eliminate most of the need to quote variables. See use safe for more information.

Modernish deprecates test/[ and [[ completely. Instead, it offers a comprehensive alternative command design that works with the usual shell grammar in a safer way while offering various feature enhancements. The following replacements are available:

Integer number arithmetic tests and operations

To test if a string is a valid number in shell syntax, str isint is available. See String tests.

The arithmetic command let

An implementation of let as in ksh, bash and zsh is now available to all POSIX shells. This makes C-style signed integer arithmetic evaluation available to every supported shell, with the exception of the unary ++ and -- operators (which are a nonstandard shell capability detected by modernish under the ID of ARITHPP).

This means let should be used for operations and tests, e.g. both let "x=5" and if let "x==5"; then... are supported (note: single = for assignment, double == for comparison). See POSIX 2.6.4 Arithmetic Expansion for more information on the supported operators.

Multiple expressions are supported, one per argument. The exit status of let is zero (the shell's idea of success/true) if the last expression argument evaluates to non-zero (the arithmetic idea of true), and 1 otherwise.

It is recommended to adopt the habit to quote each let expression with "double quotes", as this consistently makes everything work as expected: double quotes protect operators that would otherwise be misinterpreted as shell grammar, while shell expansions starting with $ continue to work.

Arithmetic shortcuts

Various handy functions that make common arithmetic operations and comparisons easier to program are available from the var/arith module.

String and file tests

The following notes apply to all commands described in the subsections of this section:

  1. "True" is understood to mean exit status 0, and "false" is understood to mean a non-zero exit status – specifically 1.
  2. Passing more than the number of arguments specified for each command is a fatal error. (If the safe mode is not used, excessive arguments may be generated accidentally if you forget to quote a variable. The test result would have been wrong anyway, so modernish kills the program immediately, which makes the problem much easier to trace.)
  3. Passing fewer than the number of arguments specified to the command is assumed to be the result of removal of an empty unquoted expansion. Where possible, this is not treated as an error, and an exit status corresponding to the omitted argument(s) being empty is returned instead. (This helps make the safe mode possible; unlike with test/[, paranoid quoting to avoid empty removal is not needed.)

String tests

The str function offers various operators for tests on strings. For example, str in $foo "bar" tests if the variable foo contains "bar".

The str function takes unary (one-argument) operators that check a property of a single word, binary (two-argument) operators that check a word against a pattern, as well as an option that makes binary operators check multiple words against a pattern.

Unary string tests

Usage: str operator [ word ]

The word is checked for the property indicated by operator; if the result is true, str returns status 0, otherwise it returns status 1.

The available unary string test operators are:

  • empty: The word is empty.
  • isint: The word is a decimal, octal or hexadecimal integer number in valid POSIX shell syntax, safe to use with let, $((...)) and other arithmetic contexts on all POSIX-derived shells. This operator ignores leading (but not trailing) spaces and tabs.
  • isvarname: The word is a valid portable shell variable or function name.

If word is omitted, it is treated as empty, on the assumption that it is an unquoted empty variable. Passing more than one argument after the operator is a fatal error.

Binary string matching tests

Usage: str operator [ [ word ] pattern ]

The word is compared to the pattern according to the operator; if it matches, str returns status 0, otherwise it returns status 1. The available binary matching operators are:

  • eq: word is equal to pattern.
  • ne: word is not equal to pattern.
  • in: word includes pattern.
  • begin: word begins with pattern.
  • end: word ends with pattern.
  • match: word matches pattern as a shell glob pattern (as in the shell's native case construct). A pattern that ends in an unescaped backslash is considered invalid and causes str to return status 2.
  • ematch: word matches pattern as a POSIX extended regular expression. An empty pattern is a fatal error. (In UTF-8 locales, check if thisshellhas WRN_EREMBYTE before matching multi-byte characters.)
  • lt: word lexically sorts before (is 'less than') pattern.
  • le: word is lexically 'less than or equal to' pattern.
  • gt: word lexically sorts after (is 'greater than') pattern.
  • ge: word is lexically 'greater than or equal to' pattern.

If word is omitted, it is treated as empty on the assumption that it is an unquoted empty variable, and the single remaining argument is assumed to be the pattern. Similarly, if both word and pattern are omitted, an empty word is matched against an empty pattern. Passing more than two arguments after the operator is a fatal error.

Multi-matching option

Usage: str -M operator [ [ word ... ] pattern ]

The -M option causes str to compare any number of words to the pattern. The available operators are the same as the binary string matching operators listed above.

All matching words are stored in the REPLY variable, separated by newline characters ($CCn) if there is more than one match. If no words match, REPLY is unset.

The exit status returned by str -M is as follows:

  • If no words match, the exit status is 1.
  • If one word matches, the exit status is 0.
  • If between two and 254 words match, the exit status is the number of matches.
  • If 255 or more words match, the exit status is 255.

Usage example: the following matches a given GNU-style long-form command line option $1 against a series of available options. To make it possible for the options to be abbreviated, we check if any of the options begin with the given argument $1.

if str -M begin --fee --fi --fo --fum --foo --bar --baz --quux "$1"; then
	putln "OK. The given option $1 matched $REPLY"
else
	case $? in
	( 1 )	putln "No such option: $1" >&2 ;;
	( * )	putln "Ambiguous option: $1" "Did you mean:" "$REPLY" >&2 ;;
	esac
fi

File type tests

These avoid the snags with symlinks you get with [ and [[. By default, symlinks are not followed. Add -L to operate on files pointed to by symlinks instead of symlinks themselves (the -L makes no difference if the operands are not symlinks).

These commands all take one argument. If the argument is absent, they return false. More than one argument is a fatal error. See notes 1-3 in the parent section.

is present file: Returns true if the file is present in the file system (even if it is a broken symlink).

is -L present file: Returns true if the file is present in the file system and is not a broken symlink.

is sym file: Returns true if the file is a symbolic link (symlink).

is -L sym file: Returns true if the file is a non-broken symlink, i.e. a symlink that points (either directly or indirectly via other symlinks) to a non-symlink file that is present in the file system.

is reg file: Returns true if file is a regular data file.

is -L reg file: Returns true if file is either a regular data file or a symlink pointing (either directly or indirectly via other symlinks) to a regular data file.

Other commands are available that work exactly like is reg and is -L reg but test for other file types. To test for them, replace reg with one of:

  • dir for a directory
  • fifo for a named pipe (FIFO)
  • socket for a socket
  • blockspecial for a block special file
  • charspecial for a character special file

File comparison tests

The following notes apply to these commands:

  • Symlinks are not resolved/followed by default. To operate on files pointed to by symlinks, add -L before the operator argument, e.g. is -L newer.
  • Omitting any argument is a fatal error, because no empty argument (removed or otherwise) would make sense for these commands.

is newer file1 file2: Compares file timestamps, returning true if file1 is newer than file2. Also returns true if file1 exists, but file2 does not; this is consistent for all shells (unlike test file1 -nt file2).

is older file1 file2: Compares file timestamps, returning true if file1 is older than file2. Also returns true if file1 does not exist, but file2 does; this is consistent for all shells (unlike test file1 -ot file2).

is samefile file1 file2: Returns true if file1 and file2 are the same file (hardlinks).

is onsamefs file1 file2: Returns true if file1 and file2 are on the same file system. If any non-regular, non-directory files are specified, their parent directory is tested instead of the file itself.

File status tests

These always follow symlinks.

is nonempty file: Returns true if the file exists, is not a broken symlink, and is not empty. Unlike [ -s file ], this also works for directories, as long as you have read permission in them.

is setuid file: Returns true if the file has its set-user-ID flag set.

is setgid file: Returns true if the file has its set-group-ID flag set.

I/O tests

is onterminal FD: Returns true if file descriptor FD is associated with a terminal. The FD may be a non-negative integer number or one of the special identifiers stdin, stdout and stderr which are equivalent to 0, 1, and 2. For instance, is onterminal stdout returns true if commands that write to standard output (FD 1), such as putln, would write to the terminal, and false if the output is redirected to a file or pipeline.

File permission tests

Any symlinks given are resolved, as these tests would be meaningless for a symlink itself.

can read file: True if the file's permission bits indicate that you can read the file - i.e., if an r bit is set and applies to your user.

can write file: True if the file's permission bits indicate that you can write to the file: for non-directories, if a w bit is set and applies to your user; for directories, both w and x.

can exec file: True if the file's type and permission bits indicate that you can execute the file: for regular files, if an x bit is set and applies to your user; for other file types, never.

can traverse file: True if the file is a directory and its permission bits indicate that a path can traverse through it to reach its subdirectories: for directories, if an x bit is set and applies to your user; for other file types, never.

The stack

In modernish, every variable and shell option gets its own stack. Arbitrary values/states can be pushed onto the stack and popped off it in reverse order. For variables, both the value and the set/unset state is (re)stored.

Usage:

  • push [ --key=value ] item [ item ... ]
  • pop [ --keepstatus ] [ --key=value ] item [ item ... ]

where item is a valid portable variable name, a short-form shell option (dash plus letter), or a long-form shell option (-o followed by an option name, as two arguments).

Before pushing or popping anything, both functions check if all the given arguments are valid and pop checks all items have a non-empty stack. This allows pushing and popping groups of items with a check for the integrity of the entire group. pop exits with status 0 if all items were popped successfully, and with status 1 if one or more of the given items could not be popped (and no action was taken at all).

The --key= option is an advanced feature that can help different modules or functions to use the same variable stack safely. If a key is given to push, then for each item, the given key value is stored along with the variable's value for that position in the stack. Subsequently, restoring that value with pop will only succeed if the key option with the same key value is given to the pop invocation. Similarly, popping a keyless value only succeeds if no key is given to pop. If there is any key mismatch, no changes are made and pop returns status 2. Note that this is a robustness/convenience feature, not a security feature; the keys are not hidden in any way.

If the --keepstatus option is given, pop will exit with the exit status of the command executed immediately prior to calling pop. This can avoid the need for awkward workarounds when restoring variables or shell options at the end of a function. However, note that this makes failure to pop (stack empty or key mismatch) a fatal error that kills the program, as pop no longer has a way to communicate this through its exit status.

The shell options stack

push and pop allow saving and restoring the state of any shell option available to the set builtin. The precise shell options supported (other than the ones guaranteed by POSIX) depend on the shell modernish is running on. To facilitate portability, nonexistent shell options are treated as unset.

Long-form shell options are matched to their equivalent short-form shell options, if they exist. For instance, on all POSIX shells, -f is equivalent to -o noglob, and push -o noglob followed by pop -f works correctly. This also works for shell-specific short & long option equivalents.

On shells with a dynamic no option name prefix, that is on ksh, zsh and yash (where, for example, noglob is the opposite of glob), the no prefix is ignored, so something like push -o glob followed by pop -o noglob does the right thing. But this depends on the shell and should never be used in portable scripts.

The trap stack

Modernish can also make traps stack-based, so that each program component or library module can set its own trap commands without interfering with others. This functionality is provided by the var/stack/trap module.

Modules

As modularity is one of modernish's design principles, much of its essential functionality is provided in the form of loadable modules, so the core library is kept lean. Modules are organised hierarchically, with names such as safe, var/loop and sys/cmd/harden. The use command loads and initialises a module or a combined directory of modules.

Internally, modules exist in files with the name extension .mm in subdirectories of lib/modernish/mdl – for example, the module var/stack/trap corresponds to the file lib/modernish/mdl/var/stack/trap.mm.

Usage:

  • use modulename [ argument ... ]
  • use [ -q | -e ] modulename
  • use -l

The first form loads and initialises a module. All arguments, including the module name, are passed on to the dot script unmodified, so modules know their own name and can implement option parsing to influence their initialisation. See also Two basic forms of a modernish program for information on how to use modules in portable-form scripts.

In the second form, the -q option queries if a module is loaded, and the -e option queries if a module exists. use returns status 0 for yes, 1 for no, and 2 if the module name is invalid.

The -l option lists all currently loaded modules in the order in which they were originally loaded. Just add | sort for alphabetical order.

If a directory of modules, such as sys/cmd or even just sys, is given as the modulename, then all the modules in that directory and any subdirectories are loaded recursively. In this case, passing extra arguments is a fatal error.

If a module file X.mm exists along with a directory X, resolving to the same modulename, then use will load the X.mm module file without automatically loading any modules in the X directory, because it is expected that X.mm handles the submodules in X manually. (This is currently the case for var/loop which auto-loads submodules containing loop types on first use).

The complete lib/modernish/mdl directory path, which depends on where modernish is installed, is stored in the system constant $MSH_MDL.

The following subchapters document the modules that come with modernish.

use safe

The safe module sets the 'safe mode' for the shell. It removes most of the need to quote variables, parameter expansions, command substitutions, or glob patterns. It uses shell settings and modernish library functionality to secure and demystify split and glob mechanisms. This creates a new and safer way of shell script programming, essentially building a new shell language dialect while still running on all POSIX-compliant shells.

Why the safe mode?

One of the most common headaches with shell scripting is caused by a fundamental flaw in the shell as a scripting language: constantly active field splitting (a.k.a. word splitting) and pathname expansion (a.k.a. globbing). To cope with this situation, it is hammered into programmers of shell scripts to be absolutely paranoid about properly quoting nearly everything, including variable and parameter expansions, command substitutions, and patterns passed to commands like find.

These mechanisms were designed for interactive command line usage, where they do come in very handy. But when the shell language is used as a programming language, splitting and globbing often ends up being applied unexpectedly to unquoted expansions and command substitutions, helping cause thousands of buggy, brittle, or outright dangerous shell scripts.

One could blame the programmer for forgetting to quote an expansion properly, or one could blame a pitfall-ridden scripting language design where hammering punctilious and counterintuitive habits into casual shell script programmers is necessary. Modernish does the latter, then fixes it.

How the safe mode works

Every POSIX shell comes with a little-used ability to disable global field splitting and pathname expansion: IFS=''; set -f. An empty IFS variable disables split; the -f (or -o noglob) shell option disables pathname expansion. The safe mode sets these, and two others (see below).

The reason these safer settings are hardly ever used is that they are not practical to use with the standard shell language. For instance, for textfile in *.txt, or for item in $(some command) which both (!) field-splits and pathname-expands the output of a command, all break.

However, that is where modernish comes in. It introduces several powerful new loop constructs, as well as arbitrary code blocks with local settings, each of which has straightforward, intuitive operators for safely applying field splitting or pathname expansion – to specific command arguments only. By default, they are not both applied to the arguments, which is much safer. And your script code as a whole is kept safe from them at all times.

With global field splitting and pathname expansion removed, a third issue still affects the safe mode: the shell's empty removal mechanism. If the value of an unquoted expansion like $var is empty, it will not expand to an empty argument, but will be removed altogether, as if it were never there. This behaviour cannot be disabled.

Thankfully, the vast majority of shell and Un*x commands order their arguments in a way that is actually designed with empty removal in mind, making it a good thing. For instance, when doing ls $option some_dir, if $option is -l the listing will be long-format and if is empty it will be removed, which is the desired behaviour. (An empty argument there would cause an error.)

However, one command that is used in almost all shell scripts, test/[, is completely unable to cope with empty removal due to its idiosyncratic and counterintuitive syntax. Potentially empty operands come before options, so operands removed as empty expansions cause errors or, worse, false positives. Thus, the safe mode does not remove the need for paranoid quoting of expansions used with test/[ commands. Modernish fixes this issue by deprecating test/[ completely and offering a safe command design to use instead, which correctly deals with empty removal.

With the 'safe mode' shell settings, plus the safe, explicit and readable split and glob operators and test/[ replacements, the only quoting requirements left are:

  1. a very occasional need to stop empty removal from happening;
  2. to quote "$@" and "$*" until shell bugs are fixed (see notes below).

In addition to the above, the safe mode also sets these shell options:

  • set -C (set -o noclobber) to prevent accidentally overwriting files using output redirection. To force overwrite, use >| instead of >.
  • set -u (set -o nounset) to make it an error to use unset (that is, uninitialised) variables by default. You'll notice this will catch many typos before they cause you hard-to-trace problems. To bypass the check for a specific variable, use ${var-} instead of $var (be careful).

Important notes for safe mode

  • The safe mode is not compatible with existing conventional shell scripts, written in what we could now call the 'legacy mode'. Essentially, the safe mode is a new way of shell script programming. That is why it is not enabled by default, but activated by loading the safe module. It is highly recommended that new modernish scripts start out with use safe.
  • The shell applies entirely different quoting rules to string matching glob patterns within case constructs. The safe mode changes nothing here.
  • Due to shell bugs ID'ed as BUG_PP_*, the positional parameters expansions $@ and $* should still always be quoted. As of late 2018, these bugs have been fixed in the latest or upcoming release versions of all supported shells. But, until buggy versions fall out of use and modernish no longer supports any BUG_PP_* shell bugs, quoting "$@" and "$*" remains mandatory even in safe mode (unless you know with certainty that your script will be used on a shell with none of these bugs).
  • The behaviour of "$*" changes in safe mode. It uses the first character of $IFS as the separator for combining all positional parameters into one string. Since IFS is emptied in safe mode, there is no separator, so it will string them together unseparated. You can use something like push IFS; IFS=' '; var="$*"; pop IFS or LOCAL IFS=' '; BEGIN var="$*"; END to use the space character as a separator. (If you're outputting the positional parameters, note that the put command always separates its arguments by spaces, so you can safely pass it multiple arguments with "$@" instead.)

Extra options for the safe mode

Usage: use safe [ -k | -K ] [ -i ]

The -k and -K module options install an extra handler that reliably kills the program if it tries to execute a command that is not found, on shells that have the ability to catch and handle 'command not found' errors (currently bash, yash, and zsh). This helps catch typos, forgetting to load a module, etc., and stops your program from continuing in an inconsistent state and potentially causing damage. The MSH_NOT_FOUND_OK variable may be set to temporarily disable this check. The uppercase -K module option aborts the program on shells that cannot handle 'command not found' errors (so should not be used for portable scripts), whereas the lowercase -k variant is ignored on such shells.

If the -i option is given, or the shell is interactive, two extra one-letter functions are loaded, s and g. These are pre-command modifiers for use when split and glob are globally disabled; they allow running a single command with local split and glob applied to that command's arguments only. They also have some options designed to manipulate, examine, save, restore, and generally experiment with the global split and glob state on interactive shells. Type s --help and g --help for more information. In general, the safe mode is designed for scripts and is not recommended for interactive shells.

use var/loop

The var/loop module provides an innovative, robust and extensible shell loop construct. Several powerful loop types are provided, while advanced shell programmers may find it easy and fun to create their own. This construct is also ideal for the safe mode: the for, select and find loop types allow you to selectively apply field splitting and/or pathname expansion to specific arguments without subjecting a single line of your code to them.

The basic form is a bit different from native shell loops. Note the caps:
LOOP looptype arguments; DO
      your commands here
DONE

The familiar do...done block syntax cannot be used because the shell will not allow modernish to add its own functionality to it. The DO...DONE block does behave in the same way as do...done: you can append redirections at the end, pipe commands into a loop, etc. as usual. The break and continue shell builtin commands also work as normal.

Remember: using lowercase do...done with modernish LOOP will cause the shell to throw a misleading syntax error. So will using uppercase DO...DONE with the shell's native loops. To help you remember to use the uppercase variants for modernish loops, the LOOP keyword itself is also in capitals.

Loops exist in submodules of var/loop named after the loop type; for instance, the find loop lives in the var/loop/find module. However, the core var/loop module will automatically load a loop type's module when that loop is first used, so use-ing individual loop submodules at your script's startup time is optional.

The LOOP block internally uses file descriptor 8 to do its thing. If your script happens to use FD 8 for other purposes, you should know that FD 8 is made local to each loop block, and always appears initially closed within DO...DONE.

Simple repeat loop

This simply iterates the loop the number of times indicated. Before the first iteration, the argument is evaluated as a shell integer arithmetic expression as in let and its value used as the number of iterations.

LOOP repeat 3; DO
	putln "This line is repeated 3 times."
DONE

BASIC-style arithmetic for loop

This is a slightly enhanced version of the FOR loop in BASIC. It is more versatile than the repeat loop but still very easy to use.

LOOP for varname=initial to limit [ step increment ]; DO
      some commands
DONE

To count from 1 to 20 in steps of 2:

LOOP for i=1 to 20 step 2; DO
	putln "$i"
DONE

Note the varname=initial needs to be one argument as in a shell assignment (so no spaces around the =).

If "step increment" is omitted, increment defaults to 1 if limit is equal to or greater than initial, or to -1 if limit is less than initial (so counting backwards 'just works').

Technically precise description: On entry, the initial, limit and increment values are evaluated once as shell arithmetic expressions as in let, the value of initial is assigned to varname, and the loop iterates. Before every subsequent iteration, the value of increment (as determined on the first iteration) is added to the value of varname, then the limit expression is re-evaluated; as long as the current value of varname is less (if increment is non-negative) or greater (if increment is negative) than or equal to the current value of limit, the loop reiterates.

C-style arithmetic for loop

A C-style for loop akin to for (( )) in ksh93, bash and zsh is now available on all POSIX-compliant shells, with a slightly different syntax. The one loop argument contains three arithmetic expressions (as in let), separated by semicolons within that argument. The first is only evaluated before the first iteration, so is typically used to assign an initial value. The second is evaluated before each iteration to check whether to continue the loop, so it typically contains some comparison operator. The third is evaluated before the second and further iterations, and typically increases or decreases a value. For example, to count from 1 to 10:

LOOP for "i=1; i<=10; i+=1"; DO
	putln "$i"
DONE

However, using complex expressions allows doing much more powerful things. Any or all of the three expressions may also be left empty (with their separating ; character remaining). If the second expression is empty, it defaults to 1, creating an infinite loop.

(Note that ++i and i++ can only be used on shells with ARITHPP, but i+=1 or i=i+1 can be used on all POSIX-compliant shells.)

Enumerative for/select loop with safe split/glob

The enumarative for and select loop types mirror those already present in native shell implementations. However, the modernish versions provide safe field splitting and globbing (pathname expansion) functionality that can be used without globally enabling split or glob for any of your code – ideal for the safe mode. They also add a unique operator for processing text in fixed-size slices. The select loop type brings select functionality to all POSIX shells and not just ksh, zsh and bash.

Usage:

LOOP [ for | select ] [ operators ] varname in argument ... ; DO commands ; DONE

Simple usage example:

LOOP select --glob textfile in *.txt; DO
	putln "You chose text file $textfile."
DONE

If the loop type is for, the loop iterates once for each argument, storing it in the variable named varname.

If the loop type is select, the loop presents before each iteration a numbered menu that allows the user to select one of the arguments. The prompt from the PS3 variable is displayed and a reply read from standard input. The literal reply is stored in the REPLY variable. If the reply was a number corresponding to an argument in the menu, that argument is stored in the variable named varname. Then the loop iterates. If the user enters ^D (end of file), REPLY is cleared and the loop breaks with an exit status of 1. (To break the menu loop under other conditions, use the break command.)

The following operators are supported. Note that the split and glob operators are only for use in the safe mode.

  • One of --split or --split=characters. This operator safely applies the shell's field splitting mechanism to the arguments given. The simple --split operator applies the shell's default field splitting by space, tab, and newline. If you supply one or more of your own characters to split by, each of these characters will be taken as a field separator if it is whitespace, or field terminator if it is non-whitespace. (Note that shells with QRK_IFSFINAL treat both whitespace and non-whitespace characters as separators.)
  • One of --glob or --fglob. These operators safely apply shell pathname expansion (globbing) to the arguments given. Each argument is taken as a pattern, whether or not it contains any wildcard characters. For any resulting pathname that starts with - or + or is identical to ! or (, ./ is prefixed to keep various commands from misparsing it as an option or operand. Non-matching patterns are treated as follows:
    • --glob: Any non-matching patterns are quietly removed. If none match, the loop will not iterate but break with exit status 103.
    • --fglob: All patterns must match. Any nonexistent path terminates the program. Use this if your program would not work after a non-match.
  • --base=string. This operator prefixes the given string to each of the arguments, after first applying field splitting and/or pathname expansion if specified. If --glob or --fglob are given, then the string is used as a base directory path for pathname expansion, without expanding any wildcard characters in that base directory path itself. If such base directory can't be entered, then if --glob was given, the loop breaks with status 98, or if --fglob was given, the program terminates.
  • One of --slice or --slice=number. This operator divides the arguments in slices of up to number characters. The default slice size is 1 character, allowing for easy character-by-character processing. (Note that shells with WRN_MULTIBYTE will not slice multi-byte characters correctly.)

If multiple operators are given, their mechanisms are applied in the following order: split, glob, base, slice.

The find loop

This powerful loop type turns your local POSIX-compliant find utility into a shell loop, safely integrating both find and xargs functionality into the POSIX shell. The infamous pitfalls and limitations of using find and xargs as external commands are gone, as all the results from find are readily available to your main shell script. Any "dangerous" characters in file names (including whitespace and even newlines) "just work", especially if the safe mode is also active. This gives you the flexibility to use either the find expression syntax, or shell commands (including your own shell functions), or some combination of both, to decide whether and how to handle each file found.

Usage:

LOOP find [ options ] varname [ in path ... ] [ find-expression ] ; DO commands ; DONE

LOOP find [ options ] --xargs[=arrayname] [ in path ... ] [ find-expression ] ; DO commands ; DONE

The loop recursively walks down the directory tree for each path given. For each file encountered, it uses the find-expression to decide whether to iterate the loop with the path to the file stored in the variable referenced by varname. The find-expression is a standard find utility expression except as described below.

Any number of paths to search may be specified after the in keyword. By default, a nonexistent path is a fatal error. The entire in clause may be omitted, in which case it defaults to in . so the current working directory will be searched. Any argument that starts with a -, or is identical to ! or (, indicates the end of the paths and the beginning of the find-expression; if you need to explicitly specify a path with such a name, prefix ./ to it.

Except for syntax errors, any errors or warnings issued by find are considered non-fatal and will cause the exit status of the loop to be non-zero, so your script has the opportunity to handle the exception.

Available options
  • Any single-letter options supported by your local find utility. Note that POSIX specifies -H and -L only, so portable scripts should only use these. Options that require arguments (-f on BSD find) are not supported.
  • --xargs. This operator is specified instead of the varname; it is a syntax error to have both. Instead of one iteration per found item, as many items as possible per iteration are stored into the positional parameters (PPs), so your program can access them in the usual way (using "$@" and friends). Note that --xargs therefore overwrites the current PPs (however, a shell function or LOCAL block will give you local PPs). Modernish clears the PPs upon completion of the loop, but if the loop is exited prematurely (such as by break), the last chunk survives.
    • On shells with the KSHARRAY capability, an extra variant is available: --xargs=arrayname which uses the named array instead of the PPs. It otherwise works identically.
  • --try. If this option is specified, then if one of the primaries used in the find-expression is not supported by either the find utility used by the loop or by modernish itself, LOOP find will not throw a fatal error but will instead quietly abort the loop without iterating it, set the loop's exit status to 128, and leave the invalid primary in the REPLY variable. (Expression errors other than 'unknown primary' remain fatal errors.)
  • One of --split or --split=characters. This operator, which is only accepted in the safe mode, safely applies the shell's field splitting mechanism to the path name(s) given (but not to any patterns in the find-expression, which are passed on to the find utility as given). The simple --split operator applies the shell's default field splitting by space, tab, and newline. Alternatively, you can supply one or more characters to split by. If any pathname resulting from the split starts with - or + or is identical to ! or (, ./ is prefixed.
  • One of --glob or --fglob. These operators are only accepted in the safe mode. They safely apply shell pathname expansion (globbing) to the path name(s) given (but not to any patterns in the find-expression, which are passed on to the find utility as given). All path names are taken as patterns, whether or not they contain any wildcard characters. If any pathname resulting from the expansion start with - or + or is identical to ! or (, ./ is prefixed. Non-matching patterns are treated as follows:
    • --glob: Any pattern not matching an existing path will output a warning to standard error and set the loop's exit status to 103 upon normal completion, even if other existing paths are processed successfully. If none match, the loop will not iterate.
    • --fglob: Any pattern not matching an existing path is a fatal error.
  • --base=basedirectory. This operator prefixes the given basedirectory to each of the path names (and thus to each path found by find), after first applying field splitting and/or pathname expansion if specified. If --glob or --fglob are given, then wildcard characters are only expanded in the path names and not in the prefixed basedirectory. If the basedirectory can't be entered, then either the loop breaks with status 98, or if --fglob was given, the program terminates.
Available find-expression operands

LOOP find can use all expression operands supported by your local find utility; see its manual page. However, portable scripts should use only operands specified by POSIX along with the modernish additions described below.

The modernish -iterate expression primary evaluates as true and causes the loop to iterate, executing your commands for each matching file. It may be used any number of times in the find-expression to start a corresponding series of loop iterations. If it is not given, the loop acts as if the entire find-expression is enclosed in parentheses with -iterate appended. If the entire find-expression is omitted, it defaults to -iterate.

The modernish -ask primary asks confirmation of the user. The text of the prompt may be specified in one optional argument (which cannot start with - or be equal to ! or (). Any occurrences of the characters {} within the prompt text are replaced with the current pathname. If not specified, the default prompt is: "{}"? If the answer is affirmative (y or Y in the POSIX locale), -ask yields true, otherwise false. This can be used to make any part of the expression conditional upon user input, and (unlike commands in the shell loop body) is capable of influencing directory traversal mid-run.

The standard -exec and -ok primaries are integrated into the main shell environment. When used with LOOP find, they can call a shell builtin command or your own shell function directly in the main shell (no subshell). Its exit status is used in the find expression as a true/false value capable of influencing directory traversal (for example, when combined with -prune), just as if it were an external command -exec'ed with the standard utility.

Some familiar, easy-to-use but non-standard find operands from GNU and/or BSD may be used with LOOP find on all systems. Before invoking the find utility, modernish translates them internally to portable equivalents. The following expression operands are made portable:

  • The -or, -and and -not operators: same as -o, -a, !.
  • The -true and -false primaries, which always yield true/false.
  • The BSD-style -depth n primary, e.g. -depth +4 yields true on depth greater than 4 (minimum 5), -depth -4 yields true on depth less than 4 (maximum 3), and -depth 4 yields true on a depth of exactly 4.
  • The GNU-style -mindepth and -maxdepth global options. Unlike BSD -depth, these GNU-isms are pseudo-primaries that always yield true and affect the entire LOOP find operation.

Expression primaries that write output (-print and friends) may be used for debugging or logging the loop. Their output is redirected to standard error.

Picking a find utility

Upon initialisation, the var/loop/find module searches for a POSIX-compliant find utility under various names in $DEFPATH and then in $PATH. To see a trace of the full command lines of utility invocations when the loop runs, set the _loop_DEBUG variable to any value.

For debugging or system-specific usage, it is possible to use a certain find utility in preference to any others on the system. To do this, add an argument to a use var/loop/find command before the first use of the loop. For example:

  • use var/loop/find bsdfind (prefer utility by this name)
  • use var/loop/find /opt/local/bin (look for a utility here first)
  • use var/loop/find /opt/local/bin/gfind (try this one first)
Compatibility mode for obsolete find utilities

Some systems come with obsolete or broken find utilities that don't fully support -exec ... {} + aggregating functionality as specified by POSIX. Normally, this is a fatal error, but passing the -b/-B option to the use command, e.g. use var/loop/find -b, enables a compatibility mode that tolerates this defect. If no compliant find is found, then an obsolete or broken find is used as a last resort, a warning is printed to standard error, and the variable _loop_find_broken is set. The -B option is equivalent to -b but does not print a warning. Loop performance may suffer as modernish adapts to using older exec ... {} \; which is very inefficient.

Scripts using this compatibility mode should handle their logic using shell code in the loop body as much as possible (after DO) and use only simple find expressions (before DO), as obsolete utilities are often buggy and breakage is likely if complex expressions or advanced features are used.

find loop usage examples

Simple example script: without the safe mode, the *.txt pattern must be quoted to prevent it from being expanded by the shell.

. modernish
use var/loop
LOOP find TextFile in ~/Documents -name '*.txt'
DO
	putln "Found my text file: $TextFile"
DONE

Example script with safe mode: the --glob option expands the patterns of the in clause, but not the expression – so it is not necessary to quote any pattern.

. modernish
use safe
use var/loop
LOOP find --glob lsProg in /*bin /*/*bin -type f -name ls*
DO
	putln "This command may list something: $lsProg"
DONE

Example use of the modernish -ask primary: ask the user if they want to descend into each directory found. The shell loop body could skip unwanted results, but cannot physically influence directory traversal, so skipping large directories would take long. A find expression can prevent directory traversal using the standard -prune primary, which can be combined with -ask, so that unwanted directories never iterate the loop in the first place.

. modernish
use safe
use var/loop
LOOP find file in ~/Documents \
	-type d \( -ask 'Descend into "{}" directory?' -or -prune \) \
	-or -iterate
DO
	put "File found: "
	ls -li $file
DONE

Creating your own loop

The modernish loop construct is extensible. To define a new loop type, you only need to define a shell function called _loopgen_type where type is the loop type. This function, called the loop iteration generator, is expected to output lines of text to file descriptor 8, containing properly shell-quoted iteration commands for the shell to run, one line per iteration.

The internal commands expanded from LOOP, DO and DONE (which are defined as aliases) launch that loop iteration generator function in the background with safe mode enabled, while causing the main shell to read lines from that background process through a pipe, evaling each line as a command before iterating the loop. As long as that iteration command finishes with an exit status of zero, the loop keeps iterating. If it has a nonzero exit status or if there are no more commands to read, iteration terminates and execution continues beyond the loop.

Instead of the normal internal namespace which is considered off-limits for modernish scripts, var/loop and its submodules use a _loop_* internal namespace for variables, which is also for use by user-implemented loop iteration generator functions.

The above is just the general principle. For the details, study the comments and the code in lib/modernish/mdl/var/loop.mm and the loop generators in lib/modernish/mdl/var/loop/*.mm.

use var/local

This module defines a new LOCAL...BEGIN...END shell code block construct with local variables, local positional parameters and local shell options. The local positional parameters can be filled using safe field splitting and pathname expansion operators similar to those in the LOOP construct described above.

Usage: LOCAL [ localitem | operator ... ] [ -- [ word ... ] ] ; BEGIN commands ; END

The commands are executed once, with the specified localitems applied. Each localitem can be:

  • A variable name with or without a = immediately followed by a value. This renders that variable local to the block, initially either unsetting it or assigning the value, which may be empty.
  • A shell option letter immediately preceded by a - or + sign. This locally turns that shell option on or off, respectively. This follows the counterintuitive syntax of set. Long-form shell options like -o optionname and +o optionname are also supported. It depends on the shell what options are supported. Specifying a nonexistent option is a fatal error. Use thisshellhas to check for a non-POSIX option's existence on the current shell before using it.

Modernish implements LOCAL blocks as one-time shell functions that use the stack to save and restore variables and settings. So the return command exits the block, causing the global variables and settings to be restored and resuming execution at the point immediately following END. Like any shell function, a LOCAL block exits with the exit status of the last command executed within it, or with the status passed on by or given as an argument to return.

The positional parameters ($@, $1, etc.) are always local to the block, but a copy is inherited from outside the block by default. Any changes to the positional parameters made within the block will be discarded upon exiting it.

However, if a double-dash -- argument is given in the LOCAL command line, the positional parameters outside the block are ignored and the set of words after -- (which may be empty) becomes the positional parameters instead.

These words can be modified prior to entering the LOCAL block using the following operators. The safe glob and split operators are only accepted in the safe mode. The operators are:

  • One of --split or --split=characters. This operator safely applies the shell's field splitting mechanism to the words given. The simple --split operator applies the shell's default field splitting by space, tab, and newline. If you supply one or more of your own characters to split by, each of these characters will be taken as a field separator if it is whitespace, or field terminator if it is non-whitespace. (Note that shells with QRK_IFSFINAL treat both whitespace and non-whitespace characters as separators.)
  • One of --glob or --fglob. These operators safely apply shell pathname expansion (globbing) to the words given. Each word is taken as a pattern, whether or not it contains any wildcard characters. For any resulting pathname that starts with - or + or is identical to ! or (, ./ is prefixed to keep various commands from misparsing it as an option or operand. Non-matching patterns are treated as follows:
    • --glob: Any non-matching patterns are quietly removed.
    • --fglob: All patterns must match. Any nonexistent path terminates the program. Use this if your program would not work after a non-match.
  • --base=string. This operator prefixes the given string to each of the words, after first applying field splitting and/or pathname expansion if specified. If --glob or --fglob are given, then the string is used as a base directory path for pathname expansion, without expanding any wildcard characters in that base directory path itself. If such base directory can't be entered, then if --glob was given, all words are removed, or if --fglob was given, the program terminates.
  • One of --slice or --slice=number. This operator divides the words in slices of up to number characters. The default slice size is 1 character, allowing for easy character-by-character processing. (Note that shells with WRN_MULTIBYTE will not slice multi-byte characters correctly.)

If multiple operators are given, their mechanisms are applied in the following order: split, glob, base, slice.

Important var/local usage notes

  • Due to the limitations of aliases and shell reserved words, LOCAL has to use its own BEGIN...END block instead of the shell's do...done. Using the latter results in a misleading shell syntax error.
  • LOCAL blocks do not mix well with use of the shell capability LOCALVARS (shell-native functionality for local variables), especially not on shells with QRK_LOCALUNS or QRK_LOCALUNS2. Using both with the same variables causes unpredictable behaviour, depending on the shell.
  • Warning! Never use break or continue within a LOCAL block to resume or break from enclosing loops outside the block! Shells with QRK_BCDANGER allow this, preventing END from restoring the global settings and corrupting the stack; shells without this quirk will throw an error if you try this. A proper way to do what you want is to exit the block with a nonzero status using something like return 1, then append something like || break or || continue to END. Note that this caveat only applies when crossing BEGIN...END boundaries. Using continue and break to continue or break loops entirely within the block is fine.

use var/arith

These shortcut functions are alternatives for using let.

Arithmetic operator shortcuts

inc, dec, mult, div, mod: simple integer arithmetic shortcuts. The first argument is a variable name. The optional second argument is an arithmetic expression, but a sane default value is assumed (1 for inc and dec, 2 for mult and div, 256 for mod). For instance, inc X is equivalent to X=$((X+1)) and mult X Y-2 is equivalent to X=$((X*(Y-2))).

ndiv is like div but with correct rounding down for negative numbers. Standard shell integer division simply chops off any digits after the decimal point, which has the effect of rounding down for positive numbers and rounding up for negative numbers. ndiv consistently rounds down.

Arithmetic comparison shortcuts

These have the same name as their test/[ option equivalents. Unlike with test, the arguments are shell integer arith expressions, which can be anything from simple numbers to complex expressions. As with $(( )), variable names are expanded to their values even without the $.

Function:         Returns successfully if:
eq <expr> <expr>  the two expressions evaluate to the same number
ne <expr> <expr>  the two expressions evaluate to different numbers
lt <expr> <expr>  the 1st expr evaluates to a smaller number than the 2nd
le <expr> <expr>  the 1st expr eval's to smaller than or equal to the 2nd
gt <expr> <expr>  the 1st expr evaluates to a greater number than the 2nd
ge <expr> <expr>  the 1st expr eval's to greater than or equal to the 2nd

use var/assign

This module is provided to solve a common POSIX shell language annoyance: in a normal shell variable assignment, only literal variable names are accepted, so it is impossible to use a variable whose name is stored in another variable. The only way around this is to use eval which is too difficult to use safely. Instead, you can now use the assign command.

Usage: assign [ [ +r ] variable=value ... ] | [ -r variable=variable2 ... ] ...

assign safely processes assignment-arguments in the same form as customarily given to the readonly and export commands, but it only assigns values to variables without setting any attributes. Each argument is grammatically an ordinary shell word, so any part or all of it may result from an expansion. The absence of a = character in any argument is a fatal error. The text preceding the first = is taken as the variable name in which to store the value; an invalid variable name is a fatal error. No whitespace is accepted before the = and any whitespace after the = is part of the value to be assigned.

The -r (reference) option causes the part to the right of the = to be taken as a second variable name variable2, and its value is assigned to variable instead. +r turns this option back off.

Examples: Each of the lines below assigns the value 'hello world' to the variable greeting.

var=greeting; assign $var='hello world'
var=greeting; assign "$var=hello world"
tag='greeting=hello world'; assign "$tag"
var=greeting; gvar=myinput; myinput='hello world'; assign -r $var=$gvar

use var/readf

readf reads arbitrary data from standard input into a variable until end of file, converting it into a format suitable for passing to the printf utility. For example, readf var <foo; printf "$var" >bar will copy foo to bar. Thus, readf allows storing both text and binary files into shell variables in a textual format suitable for manipulation with standard shell facilities.

All non-printable, non-ASCII characters are converted to printf octal or one-letter escape codes, except newlines. Not encoding newline characters allows for better processing by line-based utilities such as grep, sed, awk, etc. However, if the file ends in a newline, that final newline is encoded to \n to protect it from being stripped by command substitutions.

Usage: readf [ -h ] varname

The -h option disables conversion of high-byte characters (accented letters, non-Latin scripts). Do not use for binary files; this is only guaranteed to work for text files in an encoding compatible with the current locale.

Caveats:

  • Best for small-ish files. The encoded file is stored in memory (a shell variable). For a binary file, encoding in printf format typically about doubles the size, though it could be up to four times as large.
  • If the shell executing your program does not have printf as a builtin command, the external printf command will fail if the encoded file size exceeds the maximum length of arguments to external commands (getconf ARG_MAX will obtain this limit for your system). Shell builtin commands do not have this limit. Check for a printf builtin using thisshellhas if you need to be sure, and always harden printf!

use var/shellquote

This module provides an efficient, fast, safe and portable shell-quoting algorithm for quoting arbitrary data in such a way that the quoted values are safe to pass to the shell for parsing as string literals. This is essential for any context where the shell must grammatically parse untrusted input, such as when supplying arbitrary values to trap or eval.

The shell-quoting algorithm is optimised to minimise exponential growth when quoting repeatedly. By default, it also ensures that quoted strings are always one single printable line, making them safe for terminal output and processing by line-oriented utilities.

shellquote

Usage: shellquote [ -f|+f|-P|+P ] varname[=value] ...

The values of the variables specified by name are shell-quoted and stored back into those variables. Repeating a variable name will add another level of shell-quoting. If a = plus a value (which may be empty) is appended to the varname, that value is shell-quoted and assigned to the variable.

Options modify the algorithm for variable names following them, as follows:

  • By default, newlines and any control characters are converted into ${CC*} expansions and quoted with double quotes, ensuring that the quoted string consists of a single line of printable text. The -P option forces pure POSIX quoted strings that may span multiple lines; +P turns this back off.

  • By default, a value is only quoted if it contains characters not present in $SHELLSAFECHARS. The -f option forces unconditional quoting, disabling optimisations that may leave shell-safe characters unquoted; +f turns this back off.

shellquote will die if you attempt to quote an unset variable (because there is no value to quote).

shellquoteparams

The shellquoteparams command shell-quotes the current positional parameters in place using the default quoting method of shellquote. No options are supported and any attempt to add arguments results in a syntax error.

use var/stack

Modules that extend the stack.

use var/stack/extra

This module contains stack query and maintenance functions.

If you only need one or two of these functions, they can also be loaded as individual submodules of var/stack/extra.

For the four functions below, item can be:

  • a valid portable variable name
  • a short-form shell option: dash plus letter
  • a long-form shell option: -o followed by an option name (two arguments)
  • --trap=SIGNAME to refer to the trap stack for the indicated signal (as set by pushtrap from var/stack/trap)

stackempty [ --key=value ] [ --force ] item: Tests if the stack for an item is empty. Returns status 0 if it is, 1 if it is not. The key feature works as in pop: by default, a key mismatch is considered equivalent to an empty stack. If --force is given, this function ignores keys altogether.

clearstack [ --key=value ] [ --force ] item [ item ... ]: Clears one or more stacks, discarding all items on it. If (part of) the stack is keyed or a --key is given, only clears until a key mismatch is encountered. The --force option overrides this and always clears the entire stack (be careful, e.g. don't use within LOCAL ... BEGIN ... END). Returns status 0 on success, 1 if that stack was already empty, 2 if there was nothing to clear due to a key mismatch.

stacksize [ --silent | --quiet ] item: Leaves the size of a stack in the REPLY variable and, if option --silent or --quiet is not given, writes it to standard output. The size of the complete stack is returned, even if some values are keyed.

printstack [ --quote ] item: Outputs a stack's content. Option --quote shell-quotes each stack value before printing it, allowing for parsing multi-line or otherwise complicated values. Column 1 to 7 of the output contain the number of the item (down to 0). If the item is set, column 8 and 9 contain a colon and a space, and if the value is non-empty or quoted, column 10 and up contain the value. Sets of values that were pushed with a key are started with a special line containing --- key: value. A subsequent set pushed with no key is started with a line containing --- (key off). Returns status 0 on success, 1 if that stack is empty.

use var/stack/trap

This module provides pushtrap and poptrap. These functions integrate with the main modernish stack to make traps stack-based, so that each program component or library module can set its own trap commands without interfering with others.

This module also provides a new DIE pseudosignal that allows pushing traps to execute when die is called.

Note an important difference between the trap stack and stacks for variables and shell options: pushing traps does not save them for restoring later, but adds them alongside other traps on the same signal. All pushed traps are active at the same time and are executed from last-pushed to first-pushed when the respective signal is triggered. Traps cannot be pushed and popped using push and pop but use dedicated commands as follows.

Usage:

  • pushtrap [ --key=value ] [ --nosubshell ] [ -- ] command sigspec [ sigspec ... ]
  • poptrap [ --key=value ] [ -R ] [ -- ] sigspec [ sigspec ... ]

pushtrap works like regular trap, with the following exceptions:

  • Adds traps for a signal without overwriting previous ones.
  • An invalid signal is a fatal error. When using non-standard signals, check if thisshellhas --sig=yoursignal before using it.
  • Unlike regular traps, a stack-based trap does not cause a signal to be ignored. Setting one will cause it to be executed upon the shell receiving that signal, but after the stack traps complete execution, modernish re-sends the signal to the main shell, causing it to behave as if no trap were set (unless a regular POSIX trap is also active). Thus, pushtrap does not accept an empty command as it would be pointless.
  • Each stack trap is executed in a new subshell to keep it from interfering with others. This means a stack trap cannot change variables except within its own environment, and exit will only exit the trap and not the program. The --nosubshell option overrides this behaviour, causing that particular trap to be executed in the main shell environment instead. This is not recommended if not absolutely needed, as you have to be extra careful to avoid exiting the shell or otherwise interfere with other stack traps. This option cannot be used with DIE traps.
  • Each stack trap is executed with $? initially set to the exit status that was active at the time the signal was triggered.
  • Stack traps do not have access to the positional parameters.
  • pushtrap stores current $IFS (field splitting) and $- (shell options) along with the pushed trap. Within the subshell executing each stack trap, modernish restores IFS and the shell options f (noglob), u (nounset) and C (noclobber) to the values in effect during the corresponding pushtrap. This is to avoid unexpected effects in case a trap is triggered while temporary settings are in effect. The --nosubshell option disables this functionality for the trap pushed.
  • The --key option applies the keying functionality inherited from plain push to the trap stack. It works the same way, so the description is not repeated here.

poptrap takes just signal names or numbers as arguments. It takes the last-pushed trap for each signal off the stack. By default, it discards the trap commands. If the -R option is given, it stores commands to restore those traps into the REPLY variable, in a format suitable for re-entry into the shell. Again, the --key option works as in plain pop.

With the sole exception of DIE traps, all stack-based traps, like native shell traps, are reset upon entering a subshell. However, commands for printing traps will print the traps for the parent shell, until another trap, pushtrap or poptrap command is invoked, at which point all memory of the parent shell's traps is erased.

Trap stack compatibility considerations

Modernish tries hard to avoid incompatibilities with existing trap practice. To that end, it intercepts the regular POSIX trap command using an alias, reimplementing and interfacing it with the shell's builtin trap facility so that plain old regular traps play nicely with the trap stack. You should not notice any changes in the POSIX trap command's behaviour, except for the following:

  • The regular trap command does not overwrite stack traps (but still overwrites existing regular traps).
  • Unlike zsh's native trap command, signal names are case insensitive.
  • Unlike dash's native trap command, signal names may have the SIG prefix; that prefix is quietly accepted and discarded.
  • Setting an empty trap action to ignore a signal only works fully (passing the ignoring on to child processes) if there are no stack traps associated with the signal; otherwise, an empty trap action merely suppresses the signal's default action for the current process – e.g., after executing the stack traps, it keeps the shell from exiting.
  • The trap command with no arguments, which prints the traps that are set in a format suitable for re-entry into the shell, now also prints the stack traps as pushtrap commands. (bash users might notice the SIG prefix is not included in the signal names written.)
  • The bash/yash-style -p option, including its yash-style --print equivalent, is now supported on all shells. If further arguments are given after that option, they are taken as signal specifications and only the commands to recreate the traps for those signals are printed.
  • Saving the traps to a variable using command substitution (as in: var=$(trap)) now works on every shell supported by modernish, including (d)ash, mksh and zsh which don't support this natively.
  • To reset (unset) a trap, the modernish trap command accepts both valid POSIX syntax and legacy bash/(d)ash/zsh syntax, like trap INT to unset a SIGINT trap (which only works if the trap command is given exactly one argument). Note that this is for compatibility with existing scripts only.
  • Bypassing the trap alias to set a trap using the shell builtin command will cause an inconsistent state. This may be repaired with a simple trap command; as modernish prints the traps, it will quietly detect ones it doesn't yet know about and make them work nicely with the trap stack.

POSIX traps for each signal are always executed after that signal's stack-based traps; this means they should not rely on modernish modules that use the trap stack to clean up after themselves on exit, as those cleanups would already have been done.

The new DIE pseudosignal

The var/stack/trap module adds new DIE pseudosignal whose traps are executed upon invoking die. This allows for emergency cleanup operations upon fatal program failure, as EXIT traps cannot be executed after die is invoked.

  • On non-interactive shells (as well as subshells of interactive shells), DIE is its own pseudosignal with its own trap stack and POSIX trap. In order to kill the malfunctioning program as quickly as possible (hopefully before it has a chance to delete all your data), die doesn't wait for those traps to complete before killing the program. Instead, it executes each DIE trap simultaneously as a background job, then gathers the process IDs of the main shell and all its subprocesses, sending SIGKILL to all of them except any DIE trap processes. Unlike other traps, DIE traps are inherited by and survive in subshell processes, and pushtrap may add to them within the subshell. Whatever shell process invokes die will fork all DIE trap actions before being SIGKILLed itself. (Note that any DIE traps pushed or set within a subshell will still be forgotten upon exiting the subshell.)
  • On an interactive shell (not including its subshells), DIE is simply an alias for INT, and INT traps (both POSIX and stack) are cleared out after executing them once. This is because die uses SIGINT for command interruption on interactive shells, and it would not make sense to execute emergency cleanup commands repeatedly. As a side effect of this special handling, INT traps on interactive shells do not have access to the positional parameters and cannot return from functions.

use var/string

String comparison and manipulation functions.

use var/string/touplow

toupper and tolower: convert case in variables.

Usage:

  • toupper varname [ varname ... ]
  • tolower varname [ varname ... ]

Arguments are taken as variable names (note: they should be given without the $) and case is converted in the contents of the specified variables, without reading input or writing output.

toupper and tolower try hard to use the fastest available method on the particular shell your program is running on. They use built-in shell functionality where available and working correctly, otherwise they fall back on running an external utility.

Which external utility is chosen depends on whether the current locale uses the Unicode UTF-8 character set or not. For non-UTF-8 locales, modernish assumes the POSIX/C locale and tr is always used. For UTF-8 locales, modernish tries hard to find a way to correctly convert case even for non-Latin alphabets. A few shells have this functionality built in with typeset. The rest need an external utility. Modernish initialisation tries tr, awk, GNU awk and GNU sed before giving up and setting the variable MSH_2UP2LOW_NOUTF8. If isset MSH_2UP2LOW_NOUTF8, it means modernish is in a UTF-8 locale but has not found a way to convert case for non-ASCII characters, so toupper and tolower will convert only ASCII characters and leave any other characters in the string alone.

use var/string/trim

trim: strip whitespace from the beginning and end of a variable's value. Whitespace is defined by the [:space:] character class. In the POSIX locale, this is tab, newline, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, and space, but in other locales it may be different. (On shells with BUG_NOCHCLASS, $WHITESPACE is used to define whitespace instead.) Optionally, a string of literal characters can be provided in the second argument. Any characters appearing in that string will then be trimmed instead of whitespace. Usage: trim varname [ characters ]

use var/string/replacein

replacein: Replace leading, -trailing or -all occurrences of a string by another string in a variable.
Usage: replacein [ -t | -a ] varname oldstring newstring

use var/string/append

append and prepend: Append or prepend zero or more strings to a variable, separated by a string of zero or more characters, avoiding the hairy problem of dangling separators. Usage: append|prepend [ --sep=separator ] [ -Q ] varname [ string ... ]
If the separator is not specified, it defaults to a space character. If the -Q option is given, each string is shell-quoted before appending or prepending.

use var/unexport

The unexport function clears the "export" bit of a variable, conserving its value, and/or assigns values to variables without setting the export bit. This works even if set -a (allexport) is active, allowing an "export all variables, except these" way of working.

Usage is like export, with the caveat that variable assignment arguments containing non-shell-safe characters or expansions must be quoted as appropriate, unlike in some specific shell implementations of export. (To get rid of that headache, use safe.)

Unlike export, unexport does not work for read-only variables.

use var/genoptparser

As the getopts builtin is not portable when used in functions, this module provides a command that generates modernish code to parse options for your shell function in a standards-compliant manner. The generated parser supports short-form (one-character) options which can be stacked/combined.

Usage: generateoptionparser [ -o ] [ -f func ] [ -v varprefix ] [ -n options ] [ -a options ] [ varname ]

  • -o: Write parser to standard output.
  • -f: Function name to prefix to error messages. Default: none.
  • -v: Variable name prefix for options. Default: opt_.
  • -n: String of options that do not take arguments.
  • -a: String of options that require arguments.
  • varname: Store parser in specified variable. Default: REPLY.

At least one of -n and -a is required. All other arguments are optional. Option characters must be valid components of portable variable names, so they must be ASCII upper- or lowercase letters, digits, or the underscore.

generateoptionparser stores the generated parser code in a variable: either REPLY or the varname specified as the first non-option argument. This makes it possible to generate and use the parser on the fly with a command like eval "$REPLY" immediately following the generateoptionparser invocation.

For better efficiency and readability, it will often be preferable to insert the option parser code directly into your shell function instead. The -o option writes the parser code to standard output, so it can be redirected to a file, inserted into your editor, etc.

Parsed options are shifted out of the positional parameters while setting or unsetting corresponding variables, until a non-option argument, a -- end-of-options delimiter argument, or the end of arguments is encountered. Unlike with getopts, no additional shift command is required.

Each specified option gets a corresponding variable with a name consisting of the varprefix (default: opt_) plus the option character. If an option is not passed to your function, the parser unsets its variable; otherwise it sets it to either the empty value or its option-argument if it requires one. Thus, your function can check if any option x was given using isset, for example, if isset opt_x; then...

use sys/base

Some very common and essential utilities are not specified by POSIX, differ widely among systems, and are not always available. For instance, the which and readlink commands have incompatible options on various GNU and BSD variants and may be absent on other Unix-like systems. The sys/base module provides a complete re-implementation of such non-standard but basic utilities, written as modernish shell functions. Using the modernish version of these utilities can help a script to be fully portable. These versions also have various enhancements over the GNU and BSD originals, some of which are made possible by their integration into the modernish shell environment.

use sys/base/mktemp

A cross-platform shell implementation of mktemp that aims to be just as safe as native mktemp(1) implementations, while avoiding the problem of having various mutually incompatible versions and adding several unique features of its own.

Creates one or more unique temporary files, directories or named pipes, atomically (i.e. avoiding race conditions) and with safe permissions. The path name(s) are stored in REPLY and optionally written to stdout.

Usage: mktemp [ -dFsQCt ] [ template ... ]

  • -d: Create a directory instead of a regular file.
  • -F: Create a FIFO (named pipe) instead of a regular file.
  • -s: Silent. Store output in $REPLY, don't write any output or message.
  • -Q: Shell-quote each unit of output. Separate by spaces, not newlines.
  • -C: Automated cleanup. Pushes a trap to remove the files on exit. On an interactive shell, that's all this option does. On a non-interactive shell, the following applies: Clean up on receiving SIGPIPE and SIGTERM as well. On receiving SIGINT, clean up if the option was given at least twice, otherwise notify the user of files left. On the invocation of die, clean up if the option was given at least three times, otherwise notify the user of files left.
  • -t: Prefix one temporary files directory to all the templates: $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR or $TMPDIR if set, or /tmp. The templates may not contain any slashes. If the template has neither any trailing Xes nor a trailing dot, a dot is added before the random suffix.

The template defaults to “/tmp/temp.”. An suffix of random shell-safe ASCII characters is added to the template to create the file. For compatibility with other mktemp implementations, any optional trailing X characters in the template are removed. The length of the suffix will be equal to the amount of Xes removed, or 10, whichever is more. The longer the random suffix, the higher the security of using mktemp in a shared directory such as tmp.

Since /tmp is a world-writable directory shared by other users, for best security it is recommended to create a private subdirectory using mktemp -d and work within that.

Option -C cannot be used without option -s when in a subshell. Modernish will detect this and treat it as a fatal error. The reason is that a typical command substitution like tmpfile=$(mktemp -C) is incompatible with auto-cleanup, as the cleanup EXIT trap would be triggered not upon exiting the program but upon exiting the command substitution subshell that just ran mktemp, thereby immediately undoing the creation of the file. Instead, do something like: mktemp -sC; tmpfile=$REPLY

This module depends on the trap stack to do auto-cleanup (the -C option), so it will automatically use var/stack/trap on initialisation.

use sys/base/readlink

readlink reads the target of a symbolic link, robustly handling strange filenames such as those containing newline characters. It stores the result in the REPLY variable and optionally writes it on standard output.

Usage: readlink [ -nsefmQ ] path [ path ... ]

  • -n: If writing output, don't add a trailing newline. This does not remove the separating newlines if multiple paths are given.
  • -s: Silent operation: don't write output, only store it in REPLY.
  • -e, -f, -m: Canonicalise. Convert each path found into a canonical and absolute path that can be used starting from any working directory. Relative paths are resolved starting from the present working directory. Double slashes are removed. Any special pathname components . and .. are resolved. All symlinks encountered are followed, but a path does not need to contain any symlinks. UNC network paths (as on Cygwin) are supported. These options differ as follows:
    • -e: All pathname components must exist to produce a result.
    • -f: All but the last pathname component must exist to produce a result.
    • -m: No pathname component needs to exist; this always produces a result. Nonexistent pathname components are simulated as regular directories.
  • -Q: Shell-quote each unit of output. Separate by spaces instead of newlines. This generates a list of arguments in shell syntax, guaranteed to be suitable for safe parsing by the shell, even if the resulting pathnames should contain strange characters such as spaces or newlines and other control characters.

The exit status of readlink is 0 on success and 1 if the path either is not a symlink, or could not be canonicalised according to the option given.

use sys/base/rev

rev copies the specified files to the standard output, reversing the order of characters in every line. If no files are specified, the standard input is read.

Usage: like rev on Linux and BSD, which is like cat except that - is a filename and does not denote standard input. No options are supported.

use sys/base/seq

A cross-platform implementation of seq that is more powerful and versatile than native GNU and BSD seq(1) implementations. The core is written in bc, the POSIX arbitrary-precision calculator language. That means this seq inherits the capacity to handle numbers with a precision and size only limited by computer memory, as well as the ability to handle input numbers in any base from 1 to 16 and produce output in any base 1 and up.

Usage: seq [ -w ] [ -L ] [ -f format ] [ -s string ] [ -S scale ] [ -B base ] [ -b base ] [ first [ incr ] ] last

seq prints a sequence of arbitrary-precision floating point numbers, one per line, from first (default 1), to as near last as possible, in increments of incr (default 1). If first is larger than last, the default incr is -1. An incr of zero is treated as a fatal error.

  • -w: Equalise width by padding with leading zeros. The longest of the first, incr or last arguments is taken as the length that each output number should be padded to.
  • -L: Use the current locale's radix point in the output instead of the full stop (.).
  • -f: printf-style floating-point format. The format string is passed on (with an added \n) to awk's builtin printf function. Because of that, the -f option can only be used if the output base is 10. Note that awk's floating point precision is limited, so very large or long numbers will be rounded.
  • -s: Instead of writing one number per line, write all numbers on one line separated by string and terminated by a newline character.
  • -S: Explicitly set the scale (number of digits after the radix point). Defaults to the largest number of digits after the radix point among the first, incr or last arguments.
  • -B: Set input and output base from 1 to 16. Defaults to 10.
  • -b: Set arbitrary output base from 1. Defaults to input base. See the bc(1) manual for more information on the output format for bases greater than 16.

The -S, -B and -b options take shell integer numbers as operands. This means a leading 0X or 0x denotes a hexadecimal number and a leading 0 denotes an octal number.

For portability reasons, modernish seq uses a full stop (.) for the radix point, regardless of the system locale. This applies both to command arguments and to output. The -L option causes seq to use the current locale's radix point character for output only.

Differences with GNU and BSD seq

The -S, -B and -b options are modernish innovations. The -w, -f and -s options are inspired by GNU and BSD seq. The following differences apply:

  • Like GNU and unlike BSD, the separator specified by the -s option is not appended to the final number and there is no -t option to add a terminator character.
  • Like GNU and unlike BSD, the -s option-argument is taken as literal characters and is not parsed for backslash escape codes like \n.
  • Unlike GNU and like BSD, the output radix point defaults to a full stop, regardless of the current locale.
  • Unlike GNU and like BSD, if incr is not specified, it defaults to -1 if first > last, 1 otherwise. For example, seq 5 1 counts backwards from 5 to 1, and specifying seq 5 -1 1 as with GNU is not needed.
  • Unlike GNU and like BSD, an incr of zero is not accepted. To output the same number or string infinite times, use yes instead.
  • Unlike both GNU and BSD, the -f option accepts any format specifiers accepted by awk's printf() function.

The sys/base/seq module depends on, and automatically loads, var/string/touplow.

use sys/base/shuf

Shuffle lines of text. A portable reimplementation of a commonly used GNU utility.

Usage:

  • shuf [ -n max ] [ -r rfile ] file
  • shuf [ -n max ] [ -r rfile ] -i low-high
  • shuf [ -n max ] [ -r rfile ] -e argument ...

By default, shuf reads lines of text from standard input, or from file (the file - signifies standard input). It writes the input lines to standard output in random order.

  • -i: Use sequence of non-negative integers low through high as input.
  • -e: Instead of reading input, use the arguments as lines of input.
  • -n: Output a maximum of max lines.
  • -r: Use rfile as the source of random bytes. Defaults to /dev/urandom.

Differences with GNU shuf:

  • Long option names are not supported.
  • The -o/--output-file option is not supported; use output redirection. Safely shuffling files in-place is not supported; use a temporary file.
  • --random-source=file is changed to -r file.
  • The -z/--zero-terminated option is not supported.

use sys/base/tac

tac (the reverse of cat) is a cross-platform reimplementation of the GNU tac utility, with some extra features.

Usage: tac [ -rbBP ] [ -S separator ] file [ file ... ]

tac outputs the files in reverse order of lines/records. If file is - or is not given, tac reads from standard input.

  • -s: Specify the record (line) separator. Default: linefeed.
  • -r: Interpret the record separator as an extended regular expression. This allows using separators that may vary. Each separator is preserved in the output as it is in the input.
  • -b: Assume the separator comes before each record in the input, and also output the separator before each record. Cannot be combined with -B.
  • -B: Assume the separator comes after each record in the input, but output the separator before each record. Cannot be combined with -b.
  • -P: Paragraph mode: output text last paragraph first. Input paragraphs are separated from each other by at least two linefeeds. Cannot be combined with any other option.

Differences between GNU tac and modernish tac:

  • The -B and -P options were added.
  • The -r option interprets the record separator as an extended regular expression. This is an incompatibility with GNU tac unless expressions are used that are valid as both basic and extended regular expressions.
  • In UTF-8 locales, multi-byte characters are recognised and reversed correctly.

use sys/base/which

The modernish which utility finds external programs and reports their absolute paths, offering several unique options for reporting, formatting and robust processing. The default operation is similar to GNU which.

Usage: which [ -apqsnQ1f ] [ -P number ] program [ program ... ]

By default, which finds the first available path to each given program. If program is itself a path name (contains a slash), only that path's base directory is searched; if it is a simple command name, the current $PATH is searched. Any relative paths found are converted to absolute paths. Symbolic links are not followed. The first path found for each program is written to standard output (one per line), and a warning is written to standard error for every program not found. The exit status is 0 (success) if all programs were found, 1 otherwise.

which also leaves its output in the REPLY variable. This may be useful if you run which in the main shell environment. The REPLY value will not survive a command substitution subshell as in ls_path=$(which ls).

The following options modify the default behaviour described above:

  • -a: List all programs that can be found in the directories searched, instead of just the first one. This is useful for finding duplicate commands that the shell would not normally find when searching its $PATH.
  • -p: Search in $DEFPATH (the default standard utility PATH provided by the operating system) instead of in the user's $PATH, which is vulnerable to manipulation.
  • -q: Be quiet: suppress all warnings.
  • -s: Silent operation: don't write output, only store it in the REPLY variable. Suppress warnings except, if you run which -s in a subshell, a warning that the REPLY variable will not survive the subshell.
  • -n: When writing to standard output, do not write a final newline.
  • -Q: Shell-quote each unit of output. Separate by spaces instead of newlines. This generates a one-line list of arguments in shell syntax, guaranteed to be suitable for safe parsing by the shell, even if the resulting pathnames should contain strange characters such as spaces or newlines and other control characters.
  • -1 (one): Output the results for at most one of the arguments in descending order of preference: once a search succeeds, ignore the rest. Suppress warnings except a subshell warning for -s. This is useful for finding a command that can exist under several names, for example: which -f -1 gnutar gtar tar
    This option modifies which's exit status behaviour: which -1 returns successfully if at least one command was found.
  • -f: Throw a fatal error in cases where which would otherwise return status 1 (non-success).
  • -P: Strip the indicated number of pathname elements from the output, starting from the right. -P1: strip /program; -P2: strip /*/program, etc. This is useful for determining the installation root directory for an installed package.
  • --help: Show brief usage information.

use sys/base/yes

yes very quickly outputs infinite lines of text, each consisting of its space-separated arguments, until terminated by a signal or by a failure to write output. If no argument is given, the default line is y. No options are supported.

This infinite-output command is useful for piping into commands that need an indefinite input data stream, or to automate a command requiring interactive confirmation.

Modernish yes is like GNU yes in that it outputs all its arguments, whereas BSD yes only outputs the first. It can output multiple gigabytes per second on modern systems.

use sys/cmd

Modules in this category contain functions for enhancing the invocation of commands.

use sys/cmd/extern

extern is like command but always runs an external command, without having to know or determine its location. This provides an easy way to bypass a builtin, alias or function. It does the same $PATH search the shell normally does when running an external command. For instance, to guarantee running external printf just do: extern printf ...

Usage: extern [ -p ] [ -v ] [ -u varname ... ] [ varname=value ... ] command [ argument ... ]

  • -p: The command, as well as any commands it further invokes, are searched in $DEFPATH (the default standard utility PATH provided by the operating system) instead of in the user's $PATH, which is vulnerable to manipulation.
    • extern -p is much more reliable than the shell's builtin command -p because: (a) many existing shell installations use a wrong search path for command -p; (b) command -p does not export the default PATH, so something like command -p sudo cp foo /bin/bar searches only sudo in the secure default path and not cp.
  • -v: don't execute command but show the full path name of the command that would have been executed. Any extra arguments are taken as more command paths to show, one per line. extern exits with status 0 if all the commands were found, 1 otherwise. This option can be combined with -p.
  • -u: Temporary export override. Unset the given variable in the environment of the command executed, even if it is currently exported. Can be specified multiple times.
  • varname=value assignment-arguments: These variables/values are temporarily exported to the environment during the execution of the command.
    • This is provided because assignments preceding extern cause unwanted, shell-dependent side effects, as extern is a shell function. Be sure to provide assignment-arguments following extern instead.
    • Assignment-arguments after a -- end-of-options delimiter are not parsed; this allows commands containing a = sign to be executed.

use sys/cmd/harden

The harden function allows implementing emergency halt on error for any external commands and shell builtin utilities. It is modernish's replacement for set -e a.k.a. set -o errexit (which is fundamentally flawed, not supported and will break the library). It depends on, and auto-loads, the sys/cmd/extern module.

harden sets a shell function with the same name as the command hardened, so it can be used transparently. This function hardens the given command by checking its exit status against values indicating error or system failure. Exactly what exit statuses signify an error or failure depends on the command in question; this should be looked up in the POSIX specification (under "Utilities") or in the command's man page or other documentation.

If the command fails, the function installed by harden calls die, so it will reliably halt program execution, even if the failure occurred within a subshell.

Usage:

harden [ -f funcname ] [ -[cSpXtPE] ] [ -e testexpr ] [ var=value ... ] [ -u var ... ] command_name_or_path [ command_argument ... ]

The -f option hardens the command as the shell function funcname instead of defaulting to command_name_or_path as the function name. (If the latter is a path, that's always an invalid function name, so the use of -f is mandatory.) If command_name_or_path is itself a shell function, that function is bypassed and the builtin or external command by that name is hardened instead. If no such command is found, harden dies with the message that hardening shell functions is not supported. (Instead, you should invoke die directly from your shell function upon detecting a fatal error.)

The -c option causes command_name_or_path to be hardened and run immediately instead of setting a shell function for later use. This option is meant for commands that run once; it is not efficient for repeated use. It cannot be used together with the -f option.

The -S option allows specifying several possible names/paths for a command. It causes the command_name_or_path to be split by comma and interpreted as multiple names or paths to search. The first name or path found is used. Requires -f.

The -e option, which defaults to >0, indicates the exit statuses corresponding to a fatal error. It depends on the command what these are; consult the POSIX spec and the manual pages. The status test expression testexpr, argument to the -e option, is like a shell arithmetic expression, with the binary operators == != <= >= < > turned into unary operators referring to the exit status of the command in question. Assignment operators are disallowed. Everything else is the same, including && (logical and) and || (logical or) and parentheses. Note that the expression needs to be quoted as the characters used in it clash with shell grammar tokens.

The -X option causes harden to always search for and harden an external command, even if a built-in command by that name exists.

The -E option causes the hardening function to consider it a fatal error if the hardened command writes anything to the standard error stream. This option allows hardening commands (such as bc) where you can't rely on the exit status to detect an error. The text written to standard error is passed on as part of the error message printed by die. Note that:

  • Intercepting standard error necessitates that the command be executed from a subshell. This means any builtins or shell functions hardened with -E cannot influence the calling shell (e.g. harden -E cd renders cd ineffective).
  • -E does not disable exit status checks; by default, any exit status greater than zero is still considered a fatal error as well. If your command does not even reliably return a 0 status upon success, then you may want to add -e '>125', limiting the exit status check to reserved values indicating errors launching the command and signals caught.

The -p option causes harden to search for commands using the system default path (as obtained with getconf PATH) as opposed to the current $PATH. This ensures that you're using a known-good external command that came with your operating system. By default, the system-default PATH search only applies to the command itself, and not to any commands that the command may search for in turn. But if the -p option is specified at least twice, the command is run in a subshell with PATH exported as the default path, which is equivalent to adding a PATH=$DEFPATH assignment argument (see below).

Examples:

harden make                           # simple check for status > 0
harden -f tar '/usr/local/bin/gnutar' # id.; be sure to use this 'tar' version
harden -e '> 1' grep                  # for grep, status > 1 means error
harden -e '==1 || >2' gzip            # 1 and >2 are errors, but 2 isn't (see manual)
Important note on variable assignments

As far as the shell is concerned, hardened commands are shell functions and not external or builtin commands. This essentially changes one behaviour of the shell: variable assignments preceding the command will not be local to the command as usual, but will persist after the command completes. (POSIX technically makes that behaviour optional but all current shells behave the same in POSIX mode.)

For example, this means that something like

harden -e '>1' grep
# [...]
LC_ALL=C grep regex some_ascii_file.txt

should never be done, because the meant-to-be-temporary LC_ALL locale assignment will persist and is likely to cause problems further on.

To solve this problem, harden supports adding these assignments as part of the hardening command, so instead of the above you do:

harden -e '>1' LC_ALL=C grep
# [...]
grep regex some_ascii_file.txt

With the -u option, harden also supports unsetting variables for the duration of a command, e.g.:

harden -e '>1' -u LC_ALL grep

The -u option may be specified multiple times. It causes the hardened command to be invoked from a subshell with the specified variables unset.

Hardening while allowing for broken pipes

If you're piping a command's output into another command that may close the pipe before the first command is finished, you can use the -P option to allow for this:

harden -e '==1 || >2' -P gzip		# also tolerate gzip being killed by SIGPIPE
gzip -dc file.txt.gz | head -n 10	# show first 10 lines of decompressed file

head will close the pipe of gzip input after ten lines; the operating system kernel then kills gzip with the PIPE signal before it's finished, causing a particular exit status that is greater than 128. This exit status would normally make harden kill your entire program, which in the example above is clearly not the desired behaviour. If the exit status caused by a broken pipe were known, you could specifically allow for that exit status in the status expression. The trouble is that this exit status varies depending on the shell and the operating system. The -p option was made to solve this problem: it automatically detects and whitelists the correct exit status corresponding to SIGPIPE termination on the current system.

Tolerating SIGPIPE is an option and not the default, because in many contexts it may be entirely unexpected and a symptom of a severe error if a command is killed by a broken pipe. It is up to the programmer to decide which commands should expect SIGPIPE and which shouldn't.

Tip: It could happen that the same command should expect SIGPIPE in one context but not another. You can create two hardened versions of the same command, one that tolerates SIGPIPE and one that doesn't. For example:

harden -f hardGrep -e '>1' grep		# hardGrep does not tolerate being aborted
harden -f pipeGrep -e '>1' -P grep	# pipeGrep for use in pipes that may break

Note: If SIGPIPE was set to ignore by the process invoking the current shell, the -p option has no effect, because no process or subprocess of the current shell can ever be killed by SIGPIPE. However, this may cause various other problems and you may want to refuse to let your program run under that condition. thisshellhas WRN_NOSIGPIPE can help you easily detect that condition so your program can make a decision. See the WRN_NOSIGPIPE description for more information.

Tracing the execution of hardened commands

The -t option will trace command output. Each execution of a command hardened with -t causes the command line to be output to standard error, in the following format:

[functionname]> commandline

where functionname is the name of the shell function used to harden the command and commandline is the actual command executed. The commandline is properly shell-quoted in a format suitable for re-entry into the shell; however, command lines longer than 512 bytes will be truncated and the unquoted string (TRUNCATED) will be appended to the trace. If standard error is on a terminal that supports ANSI colours, the tracing output will be colourised.

The -t option was added to harden because the commands that you harden are often the same ones you would be particularly interested in tracing. The advantage of using harden -t over the shell's builtin tracing facility (set -x or set -o xtrace) is that the output is a lot less noisy, especially when using a shell library such as modernish.

Note: Internally, -t uses the shell file descriptor 9, redirecting it to standard error (using exec 9>&2). This allows tracing to continue to work normally even for commands that redirect standard error to a file (which is another enhancement over set -x on most shells). However, this does mean harden -t conflicts with any other use of the file descriptor 9 in your shell program.

If file descriptor 9 is already open before harden is called, harden does not attempt to override this. This means tracing may be redirected elsewhere by doing something like exec 9>trace.out before calling harden. (Note that redirecting FD 9 on the harden command itself will not work as it won't survive the run of the command.)

Simple tracing of commands

Sometimes you just want to trace the execution of some specific commands as in harden -t (see above) without actually hardening them against command errors; you might prefer to do your own error handling. trace makes this easy. It is modernish's replacement or complement for set -x a.k.a. set -o xtrace. Unlike harden -t, it can also trace shell functions.

Usage 1: trace [ -f funcname ] [ -[cSpXE] ] [ var=value ... ] [ -u var ... ] command_name_or_path [ command_argument ... ]

For non-function commands, trace acts as a shortcut for harden -t -P -e '>125 && !=255' command_name_or_path. Any further options and arguments are passed on to harden as given. The result is that the indicated command is automatically traced upon execution. A bonus is that you still get minimal hardening against fatal system errors. Errors in the traced command itself are ignored, but your program is immediately halted with an informative error message if the traced command:

  • cannot be found (exit status 127);
  • was found but cannot be executed (exit status 126);
  • was killed by a signal other than SIGPIPE (exit status > 128, except the shell-specific exit status for SIGPIPE, and except 255 which is used by some utilities, such as ssh and rsync, to return an error).

Note: The caveat for command-local variable assignments for harden also applies to trace. See Important note on variable assignments above.

Usage 2: [ #! ] trace -f funcname

If no further arguments are given, trace -f will trace the shell function funcname without applying further hardening (except against nonexistence). trace -f can be used to trace the execution of modernish library functions as well as your own script's functions. The trace output for shell functions shows an extra () following the function name.

Internally, this involves setting an alias under the function's name, so the limitations of the shell's alias expansion mechanism apply: only function calls that the shell had not yet parsed before calling trace -f will be traced. So you should use trace -f at the beginning of your script, before defining your own functions. To facilitate this, trace -f does not check that the function funcname exists while setting up tracing, but only when attempting to execute the traced function.

In portable-form modernish scripts, trace -f should be used as a hashbang command to be compatible with alias expansion on all shells. Only the trace -f form may be used that way. For example:

#! /usr/bin/env modernish
#! use safe -k
#! use sys/cmd/harden
#! trace -f push
#! trace -f pop
...your program begins here...

use sys/cmd/mapr

mapr (map records) is an alternative to xargs that shares features with the mapfile command in bash 4.x. It is fully integrated into your script's main shell environment, so it can call your shell functions as well as builtin and external utilities. It depends on, and auto-loads, the sys/cmd/procsubst module.

Usage: mapr [ -d delimiter | -D ] [ -n count ] [ -s count ] [ -c quantum ] callback

mapr reads delimited records from the standard input, invoking the specified callback command once or repeatedly as needed, with batches of input records as arguments. The callback may consist of multiple arguments. By default, an input record is one line of text.

Options:

  • -d delimiter: Use the single character delimiter to delimit input records, instead of the newline character. A NUL (0) character and multi-byte characters are not supported.
  • -P: Paragraph mode. Input records are delimited by sequences consisting of a newline plus one or more blank lines, and leading or trailing blank lines will not result in empty records at the beginning or end of the input. Cannot be used together with -d.
  • -s number: Skip and discard the first count records read.
  • -n number: Stop processing after passing a total of number records to invocation(s) of callback. If -n is not supplied or number is 0, all records are passed, except those skipped using -s.
  • -m length: Set the maximum argument length in bytes of each callback command call, including the callback command argument(s) and the current batch of up to quantum input records. The length of each argument is increased by 1 to account for the terminating null byte. The default maximum length depends on constraints set by the operating system for invoking external commands. If length is 0, this limit is disabled.
  • -c quantum: Pass at most quantum arguments at a time to each call to callback. If -c is not supplied or if quantum is 0, the number of arguments per invocation is not limited except by -m; whichever limit is reached first applies.

Arguments:

  • callback: Call the callback command with the collected arguments each time quantum lines are read. The callback command may be a shell function or any other kind of command, and is executed from the same shell environment that invoked mapr. If the callback command exits or returns with status 255 or is interrupted by the SIGPIPE signal, mapr will not process any further batches but immediately exit with the status of the callback command. If it exits with another exit status 126 or greater, a fatal error is thrown. Otherwise, mapr exits with the status of the last-executed callback command.
  • argument: If there are extra arguments supplied on the mapr command line, they will be added before the collected arguments on each invocation on the callback command.
Differences from mapfile

mapr was inspired by the bash 4.x builtin command mapfile a.k.a. readarray, and uses similar options, but there are important differences.

  • mapr passes all the records as arguments to the callback command.
  • mapr does not support assigning records directly to an array. Instead, all handling is done through the callback command (which could be a shell function that assigns its arguments to an array.)
  • The callback command is specified directly instead of with a -C option, and it may consist of several arguments (as with xargs).
  • The record separator itself is never included in the arguments passed to the callback command (so there is no -t option to remove it).
  • mapr supports paragraph mode.
  • If the callback command exits with status 255, processing is aborted.
Differences from xargs

mapr shares important characteristics with xargs while avoiding its myriad pitfalls.

  • Instead of being an external utility, mapr is fully integrated into the shell. The callback command can be a shell function or builtin, which can directly modify the shell environment.
  • mapr is line-oriented by default, so it is safe to use for input arguments that contain spaces or tabs.
  • mapr does not parse or modify the input arguments in any way, e.g. it does not process and remove quotes from them like xargs does.
  • mapr supports paragraph mode.

use sys/cmd/procsubst

This module provides a portable process substitution construct, the advantage being that this is not limited to bash, ksh or zsh but works on all POSIX shells capable of running modernish. It is not possible for modernish to introduce the original ksh syntax into other shells. Instead, this module provides a % command for use within a $(command substitution).

The % command takes one simple command as its arguments, executes it in the background, and writes a file name from which to read its output. So if % is used within a command substitution as intended, that file name is passed on to the invoking command as an argument.

The % command supports one option, -o. If that option is given, then it is expected that, instead of reading input, the invoking command writes output to the file name passed on to it, so that the command invoked by % -o can read that data from its standard input.

Example syntax comparison:
ksh/bash/zshmodernish
diff -u <(ls) <(ls -a) diff -u $(% ls) $(% ls -a)
IFS=' ' read -r user vsz args < <(ps -o 'user= vsz= args=' -p $$) IFS=' ' read -r user vsz args < $(% ps -o 'user= vsz= args=' -p $$)
{ some commands; } > >(tee stdout.log) 2> >(tee stderr.log)
(both `tee` commands write terminal output to standard output) 		{ some commands; } > $(% -o tee stdout.log) 2> $(% -o tee stderr.log)
(both `tee` commands write terminal output to standard error)

Unlike the bash/ksh/zsh version, modernish process substitution only works with simple commands. This includes shell function calls, but not aliases or anything involving shell grammar or reserved words (such as redirections, pipelines, loops, etc.). To use such complex commands, enclose them in a shell function and call that function from the process substitution.

Also note that anything that a command invoked by the % -o writes to its standard output is redirected to standard error. The main shell environment's standard output is not available because the command substitution subsumes it.

use sys/cmd/source

The source command sources a dot script like the . command, but additionally supports passing arguments to sourced scripts like you would pass them to a function. It mostly mimics the behaviour of the source command built in to bash and zsh.

If a filename without a directory path is given, then, unlike the . command, source looks for the dot script in the current directory by default, as well as searching $PATH.

It is a fatal error to attempt to source a directory, a file with no read permission, or a nonexistent file.

use sys/dir

Functions for working with directories.

use sys/dir/countfiles

countfiles: Count the files in a directory using nothing but shell functionality, so without external commands. (It's amazing how many pitfalls this has, so a library function is needed to do it robustly.)

Usage: countfiles [ -s ] directory [ globpattern ... ]

Count the number of files in a directory, storing the number in REPLY and (unless -s is given) printing it to standard output. If any globpatterns are given, only count the files matching them.

use sys/dir/mkcd

The mkcd function makes one or more directories, then, upon success, change into the last-mentioned one. mkcd inherits mkdir's usage, so options depend on your system's mkdir; only the POSIX options are guaranteed. When mkcd is run from a script, it uses cd -P to change the working directory, resolving any symlinks in the present working directory path.

use sys/term

Utilities for working with the terminal.

use sys/term/putr

This module provides commands to efficiently output a string repeatedly.

Usage:

  • putr [ number | - ] string
  • putrln [ number | - ] string

Output the string number times. When using putrln, add a newline at the end.

If a - is given instead of a number, then the total length of the output is the line length of the terminal divided by the length of the string, rounded down.

Note that, unlike with put and putln, only a single string argument is accepted.

Example: putrln - '=' prints a full terminal line of equals signs.

use sys/term/readkey

readkey: read a single character from the keyboard without echoing back to the terminal. Buffering is done so that multiple waiting characters are read one at a time.

Usage: readkey [ -E ERE ] [ -t timeout ] [ -r ] [ varname ]

-E: Only accept characters that match the extended regular expression ERE (the type of RE used by grep -E/egrep). readkey will silently ignore input not matching the ERE and wait for input matching it.

-t: Specify a timeout in seconds (one significant digit after the decimal point). After the timeout expires, no character is read and readkey returns status 1.

-r: Raw mode. Disables INTR (Ctrl+C), QUIT, and SUSP (Ctrl+Z) processing as well as translation of carriage return (13) to linefeed (10).

The character read is stored into the variable referenced by varname, which defaults to REPLY if not specified.

This module depends on the trap stack to save and restore the terminal state if the program is stopped while reading a key, so it will automatically use var/stack/trap on initialisation.

Appendix A: List of shell cap IDs

This appendix lists all the shell capabilities, quirks, and bugs that modernish can detect in the current shell, so that modernish scripts can easily query the results of these tests and decide what to do. Certain problematic system conditions are also detected this way and listed here.

The all-caps IDs below are all usable with the thisshellhas function. This makes it easy for a cross-platform modernish script to be aware of relevant conditions and decide what to do.

Each detection test has its own little test script in the lib/modernish/cap directory. These tests are executed on demand, the first time the capability or bug in question is queried using thisshellhas. See README.md in that directory for further information. The test scripts also document themselves in the comments.

Capabilities

Modernish currently identifies and supports the following non-standard shell capabilities:

  • ADDASSIGN: Add a string to a variable using additive assignment, e.g. VAR+=string
  • ANONFUNC: zsh anonymous functions (basically the native zsh equivalent of modernish's var/local module)
  • ARITHCMD: standalone arithmetic evaluation using a command like ((expression)).
  • ARITHFOR: ksh93/C-style arithmetic for loops of the form for ((exp1; exp2; exp3)) do commands; done.
  • ARITHPP: support for the ++ and -- unary operators in shell arithmetic.
  • CESCQUOT: Quoting with C-style escapes, like $'\n' for newline.
  • DBLBRACKET: The ksh88-style [[ double-bracket command ]], implemented as a reserved word, integrated into the main shell grammar, and with a different grammar applying within the double brackets. (ksh93, mksh, bash, zsh, yash >= 2.48)
  • DBLBRACKETERE: DBLBRACKET plus the =~ binary operator to match a string against an extended regular expression.
  • DBLBRACKETV: DBLBRACKET plus the -v unary operator to test if a variable is set. Named variables only. (Testing positional parameters (like [[ -v 1 ]]) does not work on bash or ksh93; check $# instead.)
  • DOTARG: Dot scripts support arguments.
  • HERESTR: Here-strings, an abbreviated kind of here-document.
  • KSH88FUNC: define ksh88-style shell functions with the function keyword, supporting dynamically scoped local variables with the typeset builtin. (mksh, bash, zsh, yash, et al)
  • KSH93FUNC: the same, but with static scoping for local variables. (ksh93 only) See Q28 at the ksh93 FAQ for an explanation of the difference.
  • KSHARRAY: ksh93-style arrays. Supported on bash, zsh (under emulate sh), mksh, and ksh93.
  • LEPIPEMAIN: execute last element of a pipe in the main shell, so that things like somecommand | read somevariable work. (zsh, AT&T ksh, bash 4.2+)
  • LINENO: the $LINENO variable contains the current shell script line number.
  • LOCALVARS: the local command creates local variables within functions defined using standard POSIX syntax.
  • NONFORKSUBSH: as a performance optimisation, subshells are implemented without forking a new process, so they share a PID with the main shell. (AT&T ksh93; it has many bugs related to this, but there's a nice workaround: ulimit -t unlimited forces a subshell to fork, making those bugs disappear! See also BUG_FNSUBSH.)
  • PRINTFV: The shell's printf builtin has the -v option to print to a variable, which avoids forking a command substitution subshell.
  • PROCREDIR: the shell natively supports <(process redirection), a special kind of redirection that connects standard input (or standard output) to a background process running your command(s). This exists on yash. Note this is not combined with a redirection like < <(command). Contrast with bash/ksh/zsh's PROCSUBST where this <(syntax) substitutes a file name.
  • PROCSUBST: the shell natively supports <(process substitution), a special kind of command substitution that substitutes a file name, connecting it to a background process running your command(s). This exists on ksh93 and zsh. (Bash has it too, but its POSIX mode turns it off, so modernish can't use it.) Note this is usually combined with a redirection, like < <(command). Contrast this with yash's PROCREDIR where the same <(syntax) is itself a redirection.
  • PSREPLACE: Search and replace strings in variables using special parameter substitutions with a syntax vaguely resembling sed.
  • RANDOM: the $RANDOM pseudorandom generator. Modernish seeds it if detected. The variable is then set it to read-only whether the generator is detected or not, in order to block it from losing its special properties by being unset or overwritten, and to stop it being used if there is no generator. This is because some of modernish depends on RANDOM either working properly or being unset.
    (The use case for non-readonly RANDOM is setting a known seed to get reproducible pseudorandom sequences. To get that in a modernish script, use awk's srand(yourseed) and int(rand()*32768).)
  • ROFUNC: Set functions to read-only with readonly -f. (bash, yash)
  • TESTERE: The regular test/[ builtin command supports the =~ binary operator to match a string against an extended regular expression.
  • TESTO: The test/[ builtin supports the -o unary operator to check if a shell option is set.
  • TRAPPRSUBSH: The ability to obtain a list of the current shell's native traps from a command substitution subshell, for example: var=$(trap). Note that modernish transparently reimplements this feature on shells without this native capability, so this feature ID is only relevant if you are bypassing modernish to access the trap builtin directly. Also, in order to be useful to modernish, this capability is only detected if the trap command in var=$(trap) can be replaced by a shell function that in turn calls the builtin trap command.
  • TRAPZERR: This feature ID is detected if the ERR trap is an alias for the ZERR trap. According to the zsh manual, this is the case for zsh on most systems, i.e. those that don't have a SIGERR signal. (The trap stack uses this feature test.)
  • VARPREFIX: Expansions of type ${!prefix@} and ${!prefix*} yield all names of set variables beginning with prefix in the same way and with the same quoting effects as $@ and $*, respectively. This includes the name prefix itself, unless the shell has BUG_VARPREFIX. (bash; AT&T ksh93)

Quirks

Modernish currently identifies and supports the following shell quirks:

  • QRK_32BIT: mksh: the shell only has 32-bit arithmetic. Since every modern system these days supports 64-bit long integers even on 32-bit kernels, we can now count this as a quirk.
  • QRK_ANDORBG: On zsh, the & operator takes the last simple command as the background job and not an entire AND-OR list (if any). In other words, a && b || c & is interpreted as a && b || { c & } and not { a && b || c; } &.
  • QRK_ARITHEMPT: In yash, with POSIX mode turned off, a set but empty variable yields an empty string when used in an arithmetic expression, instead of 0. For example, foo=''; echo $((foo)) outputs an empty line.
  • QRK_ARITHWHSP: In yash and FreeBSD /bin/sh, trailing whitespace from variables is not trimmed in arithmetic expansion, causing the shell to exit with an 'invalid number' error. POSIX is silent on the issue. The modernish isint function (to determine if a string is a valid integer number in shell syntax) is QRK_ARITHWHSP compatible, tolerating only leading whitespace.
  • QRK_BCDANGER: break and continue can affect non-enclosing loops, even across shell function barriers (zsh, Busybox ash; older versions of bash, dash and yash). (This is especially dangerous when using var/local which internally uses a temporary shell function to try to protect against breaking out of the block without restoring global parameters and settings.)
  • QRK_EMPTPPFLD: Unquoted $@ and $* do not discard empty fields. POSIX says for both unquoted $@ and unquoted $* that empty positional parameters may be discarded from the expansion. AFAIK, just one shell (yash) doesn't.
  • QRK_EMPTPPWRD: POSIX says that empty "$@" generates zero fields but empty '' or "" or "$emptyvariable" generates one empty field. But it leaves unspecified whether something like "$@$emptyvariable" generates zero fields or one field. Zsh, pdksh/mksh and (d)ash generate one field, as seems logical. But bash, AT&T ksh and yash generate zero fields, which we consider a quirk. (See also BUG_PP_01)
  • QRK_EVALNOOPT: eval does not parse options, not even --, which makes it incompatible with other shells: on the one hand, (d)ash does not accept
    eval -- "$command" whereas on other shells this is necessary if the command starts with a -, or the command would be interpreted as an option to eval. A simple workaround is to prefix arbitrary commands with a space. Both situations are POSIX compliant, but since they are incompatible without a workaround,the minority situation is labeled here as a QuiRK.
  • QRK_EXECFNBI: In pdksh and zsh, exec looks up shell functions and builtins before external commands, and if it finds one it does the equivalent of running the function or builtin followed by exit. This is probably a bug in POSIX terms; exec is supposed to launch a program that overlays the current shell, implying the program launched by exec is always external to the shell. However, since the POSIX language is rather vague and possibly incorrect, this is labeled as a shell quirk instead of a shell bug.
  • QRK_FNRDREXIT: On FreeBSD sh and NetBSD sh, an error in a redirection attached to a function call causes the shell to exit. This affects redirections of all functions, including modernish library functions as well as functions set by harden.
  • QRK_HDPARQUOT: Double quotes within certain parameter substitutions in here-documents aren't removed (FreeBSD sh; bosh). For instance, if var is set, ${var+"x"} in a here-document yields "x", not x. POSIX considers it undefined to use double quotes there, so they should be avoided for a script to be fully POSIX compatible. (Note this quirk does not apply for substitutions that remove patterns, such as ${var#"$x"} and ${var%"$x"}; those are defined by POSIX and double quotes are fine to use.) (Note 2: single quotes produce widely varying behaviour and should never be used within any form of parameter substitution in a here-document.)
  • QRK_IFSFINAL: in field splitting, a final non-whitespace IFS delimiter character is counted as an empty field (yash < 2.42, zsh, pdksh). This is a QRK (quirk), not a BUG, because POSIX is ambiguous on this.
  • QRK_LOCALINH: On a shell with LOCALVARS, local variables, when declared without assigning a value, inherit the state of their global namesake, if any. (dash, FreeBSD sh)
  • QRK_LOCALSET: On a shell with LOCALVARS, local variables are immediately set to the empty value upon being declared, instead of being initially without a value. (zsh)
  • QRK_LOCALSET2: Like QRK_LOCALSET, but only if the variable by the same name in the global/parent scope is unset. If the global variable is set, then the local variable starts out unset. (bash 2 and 3)
  • QRK_LOCALUNS: On a shell with LOCALVARS, local variables lose their local status when unset. Since the variable name reverts to global, this means that unset will not necessarily unset the variable! (yash, pdksh/mksh. Note: this is actually a behaviour of typeset, to which modernish aliases local on these shells.)
  • QRK_LOCALUNS2: This is a more treacherous version of QRK_LOCALUNS that is unique to bash. The unset command works as expected when used on a local variable in the same scope that variable was declared in, however, it makes local variables global again if they are unset in a subscope of that local scope, such as a function called by the function where it is local. (Note: since QRK_LOCALUNS2 is a special case of QRK_LOCALUNS, modernish will not detect both.) On bash >= 5.0, modernish eliminates this quirk upon initialisation by setting shopt -s localvar_unset.
  • QRK_OPTABBR: Long-form shell option names can be abbreviated down to a length where the abbreviation is not redundant with other long-form option names. (ksh93, yash)
  • QRK_OPTCASE: Long-form shell option names are case-insensitive. (yash, zsh)
  • QRK_OPTDASH: Long-form shell option names ignore the -. (ksh93, yash)
  • QRK_OPTNOPRFX: Long-form shell option names use a dynamic no prefix for all options (including POSIX ones). For instance, glob is the opposite of noglob, and nonotify is the opposite of notify. (ksh93, yash, zsh)
  • QRK_OPTULINE: Long-form shell option names ignore the _. (yash, zsh)
  • QRK_PPIPEMAIN: On zsh <= 5.5.1, in all elements of a pipeline, parameter expansions are evaluated in the current environment (with any changes they make surviving the pipeline), though the commands themselves of every element but the last are executed in a subshell. For instance, given unset or empty v, in the pipeline cmd1 ${v:=foo} | cmd2, the assignment to v survives, though cmd1 itself is executed in a subshell.
  • QRK_SPCBIXP: Variable assignments directly preceding special builtin commands are exported, and persist as exported. (bash; yash)
  • QRK_UNSETF: If 'unset' is invoked without any option flag (-v or -f), and no variable by the given name exists but a function does, the shell unsets the function. (bash)

Bugs

Modernish currently identifies and supports the following shell bugs:

  • BUG_ALIASCSHD: A spurious syntax error occurs if a here-document containing a command substitution is used within two aliases that define a block. The syntax error reporting a missing } occurs because the alias terminating the block is not correctly expanded. This bug affects var/local and var/loop as they define blocks this way. Workaround: make a shell function that handles the here-document and call that shell function from the block/loop instead. Bug found on: dash <= 0.5.10.2; Busybox ash <= 1.31.1.
  • BUG_ALIASPOSX: Running any command "foo" in POSIX mode like POSIXLY_CORRECT=y foo will globally disable alias expansion on a non-interactive shell (killing modernish), unless POSIX mode is globally enabled. Bug found on bash 4.2 through 5.0. Note: on bash versions with this bug, modernish automatically enables POSIX mode to avoid triggering it. A side effect is that process substitution (PROCSUBST) isn't available.
  • BUG_ARITHINIT: Using unset or empty variables (dash <= 0.5.9.1 on macOS) or unset variables (yash <= 2.44) in arithmetic expressions causes the shell to exit, instead of taking them as a value of zero.
  • BUG_ARITHLNNO: The shell supports $LINENO, but the variable is considered unset in arithmetic contexts, like $(( LINENO > 0 )). This makes it error out under set -u and default to zero otherwise. Workaround: use shell expansion like $(( $LINENO > 0 )). (FreeBSD sh)
  • BUG_ARITHNAN: The case-insensitive special floating point constants Inf and NaN are recognised in arithmetic evaluation, overriding any variables with the names Inf, NaN, INF, nan, etc. (AT&T ksh93; zsh 5.6 - 5.8)
  • BUG_ARITHSPLT: Unquoted $((arithmetic expressions)) are not subject to field splitting as expected. (zsh, mksh<=R49)
  • BUG_ASGNCC01: if IFS contains a $CC01 (^A) character, unquoted expansions in shell assignments discard that character (if present). Found on: bash 4.0-4.3
  • BUG_ASGNLOCAL: If you have a function-local variable (see LOCALVARS) with the same name as a global variable, and within the function you run a shell builtin command preceded by a temporary variable assignment, then the global variable is unset. (zsh <= 5.7.1)
  • BUG_BRACQUOT: shell quoting within bracket patterns has no effect (zsh < 5.3; ksh93) This bug means the - retains it special meaning of 'character range', and an initial ! (and, on some shells, ^) retains the meaning of negation, even in quoted strings within bracket patterns, including quoted variables.
  • BUG_CASEEMPT: An empty case list on a single line, as in case x in esac, is a syntax error. (AT&T ksh93)
  • BUG_CASELIT: If a case pattern doesn't match as a pattern, it's tried again as a literal string, even if the pattern isn't quoted. This can result in false positives when a pattern doesn't match itself, like with bracket patterns. This contravenes POSIX and breaks use cases such as input validation. (AT&T ksh93) Note: modernish match works around this.
  • BUG_CASEPAREN: case patterns without an opening parenthesis (i.e. with only an unbalanced closing parenthesis) are misparsed as a syntax error within command substitutions of the form $( ). Workaround: include the opening parenthesis. Found on: bash 3.2
  • BUG_CASESTAT: The case conditional construct prematurely clobbers the exit status $?. (found in zsh < 5.3, Busybox ash <= 1.25.0, dash < 0.5.9.1)
  • BUG_CDNOLOGIC: The cd built-in command lacks the POSIX-specified -L option and does not support logical traversal; it always acts as if the -P (physical traversal) option was passed. This also renders the -L option to modernish chdir ineffective. (NetBSD sh)
  • BUG_CDPCANON: cd -P (and hence also modernish chdir) does not correctly canonicalise/normalise a directory path that starts with three or more slashses; it reduces these to two initial slashes instead of one in $PWD. (zsh <= 5.7.1)
  • BUG_CMDEXEC: using command exec (to open a file descriptor, using command to avoid exiting the shell on failure) within a function causes bash <= 4.0 to fail to restore the global positional parameters when leaving that function. It also renders bash <=4.0 prone to hanging.
  • BUG_CMDEXPAN: if the command command results from an expansion, it acts like command -v, showing the path of the command instead of executing it. For example: v=command; "$v" ls or set -- command ls; "$@" don't work. (AT&T ksh93)
  • BUG_CMDOPTEXP: the command builtin does not recognise options if they result from expansions. For instance, you cannot conditionally store -p in a variable like defaultpath and then do command $defaultpath someCommand. (found in zsh < 5.3)
  • BUG_CMDPV: command -pv does not find builtins ({pd,m}ksh), does not accept the -p and -v options together (zsh < 5.3) or ignores the -p option altogether (bash 3.2); in any case, it's not usable to find commands in the default system PATH.
  • BUG_CMDSETPP: using command set -- has no effect; it does not set the positional parameters. For compat, use set without command. (mksh <= R57)
  • BUG_CMDSPASGN: preceding a special builtin with command does not stop preceding invocation-local variable assignments from becoming global. (AT&T ksh93)
  • BUG_CMDSPEXIT: preceding a special builtin (other than eval, exec, return or exit) with command does not always stop it from exiting the shell if the builtin encounters error. (bash <= 4.0; zsh <= 5.2; mksh; ksh93)
  • BUG_CSNHDBKSL: Backslashes within non-expanding here-documents within command substitutions are incorrectly expanded to perform newline joining, as opposed to left intact. (bash <= 4.4)
  • BUG_CSUBBTQUOT: A spurious syntax erorr is thrown when using double quotes within a backtick-style command substitution that is itself within double quotes. (AT&T ksh93 < 93u+m 2022-05-20)
  • BUG_CSUBLNCONT: Backslash line continuation is not processed correctly within modern-form $(command substitutions). (AT&T ksh93 < 93u+m 2022-05-21)
  • BUG_CSUBRMLF: A bug affecting the stripping of final linefeeds from command substitutions. If a command substitution does not produce any output to substitute and is concatenated in a string or here-document, then the shell removes any concurrent linefeeds occurring directly before the command substitution in that string or here-document. (dash <= 0.5.10.2, Busybox ash, FreeBSD sh)
  • BUG_CSUBSTDO: If standard output (file descriptor 1) is closed before entering a command substitution, and any other file descriptors are redirected within the command substitution, commands such as echo or putln will not work within the command substitution, acting as if standard output is still closed (AT&T ksh93 <= AJM 93u+ 2012-08-01). Workaround: see cap/BUG_CSUBSTDO.t.
  • BUG_DEVTTY: the shell can't redirect output to /dev/tty if set -C/set -o noclobber (part of safe mode) is active. Workaround: use >| /dev/tty instead of > /dev/tty. Bug found on: bash on certain systems (at least QNX and Interix).
  • BUG_DOLRCSUB: parsing problem where, inside a command substitution of the form $(...), the sequence $$'...' is treated as $'...' (i.e. as a use of CESCQUOT), and $$"..." as $"..." (bash-specific translatable string). (Found in bash up to 4.4)
  • BUG_DQGLOB: globbing is not properly deactivated within double-quoted strings. Within double quotes, a * or ? immediately following a backslash is interpreted as a globbing character. This applies to both pathname expansion and pattern matching in case. Found in: dash. (The bug is not triggered when using modernish match.)
  • BUG_EXPORTUNS: Setting the export flag on an otherwise unset variable causes a set and empty environment variable to be exported, though the variable continues to be considered unset within the current shell. (FreeBSD sh < 13.0)
  • BUG_FNSUBSH: Function definitions within subshells (including command substitutions) are ignored if a function by the same name exists in the main shell, so the wrong function is executed. unset -f is also silently ignored. ksh93 (all current versions as of November 2018) has this bug. It only applies to non-forked subshells. See NONFORKSUBSH.
  • BUG_FORLOCAL: a for loop in a function makes the iteration variable local to the function, so it won't survive the execution of the function. Found on: yash. This is intentional and documented behaviour on yash in non-POSIX mode, but in POSIX terms it's a bug, so we mark it as such.
  • BUG_GETOPTSMA: The getopts builtin leaves a : instead of a ? in the specified option variable if a given option that requires an argument lacks an argument, and the option string does not start with a :. (zsh)
  • BUG_HDOCBKSL: Line continuation using backslashes in expanding here-documents is handled incorrectly. (zsh up to 5.4.2)
  • BUG_HDOCMASK: Here-documents (and here-strings, see HERESTRING) use temporary files. This fails if the current umask setting disallows the user to read, so the here-document can't read from the shell's temporary file. Workaround: ensure user-readable umask when using here-documents. (bash, mksh, zsh)
  • BUG_IFSCC01PP: If IFS contains a $CC01 (^A) control character, the expansion "$@" (even quoted) is gravely corrupted. Since many modernish functions use this to loop through the positional parameters, this breaks the library. (Found in bash < 4.4)
  • BUG_IFSGLOBC: In glob pattern matching (such as in case and [[), if a wildcard character is part of IFS, it is matched literally instead of as a matching character. This applies to glob characters *, ?, [ and ]. Since nearly all modernish functions use case for argument validation and other purposes, nearly every modernish function breaks on shells with this bug if IFS contains any of these three characters! (Found in bash < 4.4)
  • BUG_IFSGLOBP: In pathname expansion (filename globbing), if a wildcard character is part of IFS, it is matched literally instead of as a matching character. This applies to glob characters *, ?, [ and ]. (Bug found in bash, all versions up to at least 4.4)
  • BUG_IFSGLOBS: in glob pattern matching (as in case or parameter substitution with # and %), if IFS starts with ? or * and the "$*" parameter expansion inserts any IFS separator characters, those characters are erroneously interpreted as wildcards when quoted "$*" is used as the glob pattern. (AT&T ksh93)
  • BUG_IFSISSET: AT&T ksh93 (2011/2012 versions): ${IFS+s} always yields s even if IFS is unset. This applies to IFS only.
  • BUG_ISSETLOOP: AT&T ksh93: Expansions like ${var+set} remain static when used within a for, while or until loop; the expansions don't change along with the state of the variable, so they cannot be used to check whether a variable is set within a loop if the state of that variable may change in the course of the loop.
  • BUG_KBGPID: AT&T ksh93: If a single command ending in & (i.e. a background job) is enclosed in a { braces; } block with an I/O redirection, the $! special parameter is not set to the background job's PID.
  • BUG_KUNSETIFS: AT&T ksh93: Unsetting IFS fails to activate default field splitting if the following conditions are met: 1. IFS is set and empty (i.e. split is disabled) in the main shell, and at least one expansion has been processed with that setting; 2. The code is currently executing in a non-forked subshell (see NONFORKSUBSH).
  • BUG_LNNONEG: $LINENO becomes wildly inaccurate, even negative, when dotting/sourcing scripts. Bug found on: dash with LINENO support compiled in.
  • BUG_LOOPRET1: If a return command is given with a status argument within the set of conditional commands in a while or until loop (i.e., between while/until and do), the status argument is ignored and the function returns with status 0 instead of the specified status. Found on: dash <= 0.5.8; zsh <= 5.2
  • BUG_LOOPRET2: If a return command is given without a status argument within the set of conditional commands in a while or until loop (i.e., between while/until and do), the exit status passed down from the previous command is ignored and the function returns with status 0 instead. Found on: dash <= 0.5.10.2; AT&T ksh93; zsh <= 5.2
  • BUG_LOOPRET3: If a return command is given within the set of conditional commands in a while or until loop (i.e., between while/until and do), and the return status (either the status argument to return or the exit status passed down from the previous command by return without a status argument) is non-zero, and the conditional command list itself yields false (for while) or true (for until), and the whole construct is executed in a dot script sourced from another script, then too many levels of loop are broken out of, causing program flow corruption or premature exit. Found on: zsh <= 5.7.1
  • BUG_MULTIBIFS: We're on a UTF-8 locale and the shell supports UTF-8 characters in general (i.e. we don't have WRN_MULTIBYTE) – however, using multi-byte characters as IFS field delimiters still doesn't work. For example, "$*" joins positional parameters on the first byte of IFS instead of the first character. (ksh93, mksh, FreeBSD sh, Busybox ash)
  • BUG_NOCHCLASS: POSIX-mandated character [:classes:] within bracket [expressions] are not supported in glob patterns. (mksh)
  • BUG_NOEXPRO: Cannot export read-only variables. (zsh <= 5.7.1 in sh mode)
  • BUG_OPTNOLOG: on dash, setting -o nolog causes $- to wreak havoc: trying to expand $- silently aborts parsing of an entire argument, so e.g. "one,$-,two" yields "one,". (Same applies to -o debug.)
  • BUG_PP_01: POSIX says that empty "$@" generates zero fields but empty '' or "" or "$emptyvariable" generates one empty field. This means concatenating "$@" with one or more other, separately quoted, empty strings (like "$@""$emptyvariable") should still produce one empty field. But on bash 3.x, this erroneously produces zero fields. (See also QRK_EMPTPPWRD)
  • BUG_PP_02: Like BUG_PP_01, but with unquoted $@ and only with "$emptyvariable"$@, not $@"$emptyvariable". (mksh <= R50f; FreeBSD sh <= 10.3)
  • BUG_PP_03: When IFS is unset or empty (zsh 5.3.x) or empty (mksh <= R50), assigning var=$* only assigns the first field, failing to join and discarding the rest of the fields. Workaround: var="$*" (POSIX leaves var=$@, etc. undefined, so we don't test for those.)
  • BUG_PP_03A: When IFS is unset, assignments like var=$* incorrectly remove leading and trailing spaces (but not tabs or newlines) from the result. Workaround: quote the expansion. Found on: bash 4.3 and 4.4.
  • BUG_PP_03B: When IFS is unset, assignments like var=${var+$*}, etc. incorrectly remove leading and trailing spaces (but not tabs or newlines) from the result. Workaround: quote the expansion. Found on: bash 4.3 and 4.4.
  • BUG_PP_03C: When IFS is unset, assigning var=${var-$*} only assigns the first field, failing to join and discarding the rest of the fields. (zsh 5.3, 5.3.1) Workaround: var=${var-"$*"}
  • BUG_PP_04A: Like BUG_PP_03A, but for conditional assignments within parameter substitutions, as in : ${var=$*} or : ${var:=$*}. Workaround: quote either $* within the expansion or the expansion itself. (bash <= 4.4)
  • BUG_PP_04E: When assigning the positional parameters ($*) to a variable using a conditional assignment within a parameter substitution, e.g. : ${var:=$*}, the fields are always joined and separated by spaces, except if IFS is set and empty. Workaround as in BUG_PP_04A. (bash 4.3)
  • BUG_PP_04_S: When IFS is null (empty), the result of a substitution like ${var=$*} is incorrectly field-split on spaces. The assignment itself succeeds normally. Found on: bash 4.2, 4.3
  • BUG_PP_05: POSIX says that empty $@ and $* generate zero fields, but with null IFS, empty unquoted $@ and $* yield one empty field. Found on: dash 0.5.9 and 0.5.9.1; Busybox ash.
  • BUG_PP_06A: POSIX says that unquoted $@ and $* initially generate as many fields as there are positional parameters, and then (because $@ or $* is unquoted) each field is split further according to IFS. With this bug, the latter step is not done if IFS is unset (i.e. default split). Found on: zsh < 5.4
  • BUG_PP_07: unquoted $* and $@ (including in substitutions like ${1+$@} or ${var-$*}) do not perform default field splitting if IFS is unset. Found on: zsh (up to 5.3.1) in sh mode
  • BUG_PP_07A: When IFS is unset, unquoted $* undergoes word splitting as if IFS=' ', and not the expected IFS=" ${CCt}${CCn}". Found on: bash 4.4
  • BUG_PP_08: When IFS is empty, unquoted $@ and $* do not generate one field for each positional parameter as expected, but instead join them into a single field without a separator. Found on: yash < 2.44 and dash < 0.5.9 and Busybox ash < 1.27.0
  • BUG_PP_08B: When IFS is empty, unquoted $* within a substitution (e.g. ${1+$*} or ${var-$*}) does not generate one field for each positional parameter as expected, but instead joins them into a single field without a separator. Found on: bash 3 and 4
  • BUG_PP_09: When IFS is non-empty but does not contain a space, unquoted $* within a substitution (e.g. ${1+$*} or ${var-$*}) does not generate one field for each positional parameter as expected, but instead joins them into a single field separated by spaces (even though, as said, IFS does not contain a space). Found on: bash 4.3
  • BUG_PP_10: When IFS is null (empty), assigning var=$* removes any $CC01 (^A) and $CC7F (DEL) characters. (bash 3, 4)
  • BUG_PP_10A: When IFS is non-empty, assigning var=$* prefixes each $CC01 (^A) and $CC7F (DEL) character with a $CC01 character. (bash 4.4)
  • BUG_PP_1ARG: When IFS is empty on bash <= 4.3 (i.e. field splitting is off), ${1+"$@"} or "${1+$@}" is counted as a single argument instead of each positional parameter as separate arguments. This also applies to prepending text only if there are positional parameters with something like "${1+foobar $@}".
  • BUG_PP_MDIGIT: Multiple-digit positional parameters don't require expansion braces, so e.g. $10 = ${10} (dash; Busybox ash). This is classed as a bug because it causes a straight-up incompatibility with POSIX scripts. POSIX says: "The parameter name or symbol can be enclosed in braces, which are optional except for positional parameters with more than one digit [...]".
  • BUG_PSUBASNCC: in an assignment parameter substitution of the form ${foo=value}, if the characters $CC01 (^A) or $CC7F (DEL) are in the value, all their occurrences are stripped from the expansion (although the assignment itself is done correctly). If the expansion is quoted, only $CC01 is stripped. This bug is independent of the state of IFS, except if IFS is null, the assignment in ${foo=$*} (unquoted) is buggy too: it strips $CC01 from the assigned value. (Found on bash 4.2, 4.3, 4.4)
  • BUG_PSUBBKSL1: A backslash-escaped } character within a quoted parameter substitution is not unescaped. (bash 3.2, dash <= 0.5.9.1, Busybox 1.27 ash)
  • BUG_PSUBEMIFS: if IFS is empty (no split, as in safe mode), then if a parameter substitution of the forms ${foo-$*}, ${foo+$*}, ${foo:-$*} or ${foo:+$*} occurs in a command argument, the characters $CC01 (^A) or $CC7F (DEL) are stripped from the expanded argument. (Found on: bash 4.4)
  • BUG_PSUBEMPT: Expansions of the form ${V-} and ${V:-} are not subject to normal shell empty removal if that parameter is unset, causing unexpected empty arguments to commands. Workaround: ${V+$V} and ${V:+$V} work as expected. (Found on FreeBSD 10.3 sh)
  • BUG_PSUBIFSNW: When field-splitting unquoted parameter substitutions like ${var#foo}, ${var##foo}, ${var%foo} or ${var%%foo} on non-whitespace IFS, if there is an initial empty field, a spurious extra initial empty field is generated. (mksh)
  • BUG_PSUBNEWLN: Due to a bug in the parser, parameter substitutions spread over more than one line cause a syntax error. Workaround: instead of a literal newline, use $CCn. (found in dash <= 0.5.9.1 and Busybox ash <= 1.28.1)
  • BUG_PSUBSQUOT: in pattern matching parameter substitutions (${param#pattern}, ${param%pattern}, ${param##pattern} and ${param%%pattern}), if the whole parameter substitution is quoted with double quotes, then single quotes in the pattern are not parsed. POSIX says they are to keep their special meaning, so that glob characters may be quoted. For example: x=foobar; echo "${x#'foo'}" should yield bar but with this bug yields foobar. (dash <= 0.5.9.1; Busybox 1.27 ash)
  • BUG_PSUBSQHD: Like BUG_PSUBSQUOT, but included a here-document instead of quoted with double quotes. (dash <= 0.5.9.1; mksh)
  • BUG_PUTIOERR: Shell builtins that output strings (echo, printf, ksh/zsh print), and thus also modernish put and putln, do not check for I/O errors on output. This means a script cannot check for them, and a script process in a pipe can get stuck in an infinite loop if SIGPIPE is ignored.
  • BUG_READWHSP: If there is more than one field to read, read does not trim trailing IFS whitespace. (dash 0.5.7, 0.5.8)
  • BUG_REDIRIO: the I/O redirection operator <> (open a file descriptor for both read and write) defaults to opening standard output (i.e. is short for 1<>) instead of defaulting to opening standard input (0<>) as POSIX specifies. (AT&T ksh93)
  • BUG_REDIRPOS: Buggy behaviour occurs if a redirection is positioned in between to variable assignments in the same command. On zsh 5.0.x, a parse error is thrown. On zsh 5.1 to 5.4.2, anything following the redirection (other assignments or command arguments) is silently ignored.
  • BUG_SCLOSEDFD: bash < 5.0 and dash fail to establish a block-local scope for a file descriptor that is added to the end of the block as a redirection that closes that file descriptor (e.g. } 8<&- or done 7>&-). If that FD is already closed outside the block, the FD remains global, so you can't locally exec it. So with this bug, it is not straightforward to make a block-local FD appear initially closed within a block. Workaround: first open the FD, then close it – for example: done 7>/dev/null 7>&- will establish a local scope for FD 7 for the preceding do...done block while still making FD 7 appear initially closed within the block.
  • BUG_SETOUTVAR: The set builtin (with no arguments) only prints native function-local variables when called from a shell function. (yash <= 2.46)
  • BUG_SHIFTERR0: The shift builtin silently returns a successful exit status (0) when attempting to shift a number greater than the current amount of positional parameters. (Busybox ash <= 1.28.4)
  • BUG_SPCBILOC: Variable assignments preceding special builtins create a partially function-local variable if a variable by the same name already exists in the global scope. (bash < 5.0 in POSIX mode)
  • BUG_TESTERR1A: test/[ exits with a non-error false status (1) if an invalid argument is given to an operator. (AT&T ksh93)
  • BUG_TESTILNUM: On dash (up to 0.5.8), giving an illegal number to test -t or [ -t causes some kind of corruption so the next test/[ invocation fails with an "unexpected operator" error even if it's legit.
  • BUG_TESTONEG: The test/[ builtin supports a -o unary operator to check if a shell option is set, but it ignores the no prefix on shell option names, so something like [ -o noclobber ] gives a false positive. Bug found on yash up to 2.43. (The TESTO feature test implicitly checks against this bug and won't detect the feature if the bug is found.)
  • BUG_TRAPEMPT: The trap builtin does not quote empty traps in its output, rendering the output unsuitable for shell re-input. For instance, trap '' INT; trap outputs "trap -- INT" instead of "trap -- '' INT". (found in mksh <= R56c)
  • BUG_TRAPEXIT: the shell's trap builtin does not know the EXIT trap by name, but only by number (0). Using the name throws a "bad trap" error. Found in klibc 2.0.4 dash.
  • BUG_TRAPFNEXI: When a function issues a signal whose trap exits the shell, the shell is not exited immediately, but only on return from the function. (zsh)
  • BUG_TRAPRETIR: Using return within eval triggers infinite recursion if both a RETURN trap and the functrace shell option are active. This bug in bash-only functionality triggers a crash when using modernish, so to avoid this, modernish automatically disables the functrace shell option if a RETURN trap is set or pushed and this bug is detected. (bash 4.3, 4.4)
  • BUG_TRAPSUB0: Subshells in traps fail to pass down a nonzero exit status of the last command they execute, under certain conditions or consistently, depending on the shell. (bash <= 4.0; dash 0.5.9 - 0.5.10.2; yash <= 2.47)
  • BUG_TRAPUNSRE: When a trap unsets itself and then resends its own signal, the execution of the trap action (including functions called by it) is not interrupted by the now-untrapped signal; instead, the process terminates after completing the entire trap routine. (bash <= 4.2; zsh)
  • BUG_UNSETUNXP: If an unset variable is given the export flag using the export command, a subsequent unset command does not remove that export flag again. Workaround: assign to the variable first, then unset it to unexport it. (Found on AT&T ksh JM-93u-2011-02-08; Busybox 1.27.0 ash)
  • BUG_VARPREFIX: On a shell with the VARPREFIX feature, expansions of type ${!prefix@} and ${!prefix*} do not find the variable name prefix itself. (AT&T ksh93)
  • BUG_ZSHNAMES: A series of lowerase names, normally okay for script use as per POSIX convention, is reserved for special use. Unsetting these names is impossible in most cases, and changing them may corrupt important shell or system settings. This may conflict with simple-form modernish scripts. This bug is detected on zsh when it was not initially invoked in emulation mode, and emulation mode was enabled using emulate sh post invocation instead (which does not disable these conflicting parameters). As of zsh 5.6, the list of variable names affected is: aliases argv builtins cdpath commands dirstack dis_aliases dis_builtins dis_functions dis_functions_source dis_galiases dis_patchars dis_reswords dis_saliases fignore fpath funcfiletrace funcsourcetrace funcstack functions functions_source functrace galiases histchars history historywords jobdirs jobstates jobtexts keymaps mailpath manpath module_path modules nameddirs options parameters patchars path pipestatus prompt psvar reswords saliases signals status termcap terminfo userdirs usergroups watch widgets zsh_eval_context zsh_scheduled_events
  • BUG_ZSHNAMES2: Two lowercase variable names histchars and signals, normally okay for script use as per POSIX convention, are reserved for special use on zsh, even if zsh is initialised in sh mode (via a sh symlink or using the --emulate sh option at startup). Bug found on: zsh <= 5.7.1. The bug is only detected if BUG_ZSHNAMES is not detected, because this bug's effects are included in that one's.

Warning IDs

Warning IDs do not identify any characteristic of the shell, but instead warn about a potentially problematic system condition that was detected at initialisation time.

  • WRN_EREMBYTE: The current system locale setting supports Unicode UTF-8 multi-byte/variable-length characters, but the utility used by str ematch to match extended regular expressions (EREs) does not support them and treats all characters as single bytes. This means multi-byte characters will be matched as multiple characters, and character [:classes:] within bracket expressions will only match ASCII characters.
  • WRN_MULTIBYTE: The current system locale setting supports Unicode UTF-8 multi-byte/variable-length characters, but the current shell does not support them and treats all characters as single bytes. This means counting or processing multi-byte characters with the current shell will produce incorrect results. Scripts that need compatibility with this system condition should check if thisshellhas WRN_MULTIBYTE and resort to a workaround that uses external utilities where necessary.
  • WRN_NOSIGPIPE: Modernish has detected that the process that launched the current program has set SIGPIPE to ignore, an irreversible condition that is in turn inherited by any process started by the current shell, and their subprocesses, and so on. The system constant $SIGPIPESTATUS is set to the special value 99999 and neither the current shell nor any process it spawns is now capable of receiving SIGPIPE. The -P option to harden is also rendered ineffective. Depending on how a given command foo is implemented, it is now possible that a pipeline such as foo | head -n 10 never ends; if foo doesn't check for I/O errors, the only way it would ever stop trying to write lines is by receiving SIGPIPE as head terminates. Programs that use commands in this fashion should check if thisshellhas WRN_NOSIGPIPE and either employ workarounds or refuse to run if so.

Appendix B: Regression test suite

Modernish comes with a suite of regression tests to detect bugs in modernish itself, which can be run using modernish --test after installation. By default, it will run all the tests verbosely but without tracing the command execution. The install.sh installer will run modernish --test -eqq on the selected shell before installation.

A few options are available to specify after --test:

  • -h: show help.
  • -e: disable or reduce expensive (i.e. slow or memory-hogging) tests.
  • -q: quieter operation; report expected fails [known shell bugs] and unexpected fails [bugs in modernish]). Add -q again for quietest operation (report unexpected fails only).
  • -s: entirely silent operation.
  • -t: run only specific test sets or tests. Test sets are those listed in the full default output of modernish --test. This option requires an option-argument in the following format:
    testset1:num1,num2,…/testset2:num1,num2,…/…
    The colon followed by numbers is optional; if omitted, the entire set will be run, otherwise the given numbered tests will be run in the given order. Example: modernish --test -t match:2,4,7/arith/shellquote:1 runs test 2, 4 and 7 from the match set, the entire arith set, and only test 1 from the shellquote set. A testset can also be given as the incomplete beginning of a name or as a shell glob pattern. In that case, all matching sets will be run.
  • -x: trace each test using the shell's xtrace facility. Each trace is stored in a separate file in a specially created temporary directory. By default, the trace is deleted if a test does not produce an unexpected fail. Add -x again to keep expected fails as well, and again to keep all traces regardless of result. If any traces were saved, modernish will tell you the location of the temporary directory at the end, otherwise it will silently remove the directory again.
  • -E: don't run any tests, but output a command to open the tests that would have been run in your editor. The editor from the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variable is used, with vi as a default. This option should be used together with -t to specify tests. All other options are ignored.
  • -F: takes an argument with the name or path to a find utility to prefer when testing LOOP find. More info here.

These short options can be combined so, for example, --test -qxx is the same as --test -q -x -x.

Difference between capability detection and regression tests

Note the difference between these regression tests and the cap tests listed in Appendix A. The latter are tests for whatever shell is executing modernish: they detect capabilities (features, quirks, bugs) of the current shell. They are meant to be run via thisshellhas and are designed to be taken advantage of in scripts. On the other hand, these tests run by modernish --test are regression tests for modernish itself. It does not make sense to use these in a script.

New/unknown shell bugs can still cause modernish regression tests to fail, of course. That's why some of the regression tests also check for consistency with the results of the capability detection tests: if there is a shell bug in a widespread release version that modernish doesn't know about yet, this in turn is considered to be a bug in modernish, because one of its goals is to know about all the shell bugs in all released shell versions currently seeing significant use.

Testing modernish on all your shells

The testshells.sh program in share/doc/modernish/examples can be used to run the regression test suite on all the shells installed on your system. You could put it as testshells in some convenient location in your $PATH, and then simply run:

testshells modernish --test

(adding any further options you like – for instance, you might like to add -q to avoid very long terminal output). On first run, testshells will generate a list of shells it can find on your system and it will give you a chance to edit it before proceeding.

Appendix C: Supported locales

modernish, like most shells, fully supports two system locales: POSIX (a.k.a. C, a.k.a. ASCII) and Unicode's UTF-8. It will work in other locales, but things like converting to upper/lower case, and matching single characters in patterns, are not guaranteed.

Caveat: some shells or operating systems have bugs that prevent (or lack features required for) full locale support. If portability is a concern, check for thisshellhas WRN_MULTIBYTE or thisshellhas BUG_NOCHCLASS where needed. See Appendix A.

Scripts/programs should not change the locale (LC_* or LANG) after initialising modernish. Doing this might break various functions, as modernish sets specific versions depending on your OS, shell and locale. (Temporarily changing the locale is fine as long as you don't use modernish features that depend on it – for example, setting a specific locale just for an external command. However, if you use harden, see the important note in its documentation!)

Appendix D: Supported shells

Modernish builds on the POSIX 2018 Edition standard, so it should run on any sufficiently POSIX-compliant shell and operating system. It uses both bug/feature detection and regression testing to determine whether it can run on any particular shell, so it does not block or support particular shell versions as such. However, modernish has been confirmed to run correctly on the following shells:

  • bash 3.2 or higher
  • Busybox ash 1.20.0 or higher, excluding 1.28.x (also possibly excluding anything older than 1.27.x on UTF-8 locales, depending on your operating system)
  • dash (Debian sh) 0.5.7 or higher, excluding 0.5.10, 0.5.10.1, 0.5.11-0.5.11.4
  • FreeBSD sh 11.0 or higher
  • gwsh
  • ksh 93u+ 2012-08-01, 93u+m
  • mksh version R55 or higher
  • NetBSD sh 9.0 or higher
  • yash 2.40 or higher (2.44+ for POSIX mode)
  • zsh 5.3 or higher

Currently known not to run modernish due to excessive bugs:

Appendix E: zsh: integration with native scripts

This appendix is specific to zsh.

While modernish duplicates some functionality already available natively on zsh, it still has plenty to add. However, writing a normal simple-form modernish script turns emulate sh on for the entire script, so you lose important aspects of the zsh language.

But there is another way – modernish functionality may be integrated with native zsh scripts using 'sticky emulation', as follows:

emulate -R sh -c '. modernish'

This causes modernish functions to run in sh mode while your script will still run in native zsh mode with all its advantages. The following notes apply:

  • Using the safe mode is not recommended, as zsh does not apply split/glob to variable expansions by default, and the modernish safe mode would defeat the ${~var} and ${=var} flags that apply these on a case by case basis. This does mean that:
    • The --split and --glob operators to constructs such as LOOP find are not available. Use zsh expansion flags instead.
    • Quoting literal glob patterns to commands like find remains necessary.
  • Using LOCAL is not recommended. Anonymous functions are the native zsh equivalent.
  • Native zsh loops should be preferred over modernish loops, except where modernish adds functionality not available in zsh (such as LOOP find or user-programmed loops).

See man zshbuiltins under emulate, option -c, for more information.

Appendix F: Bundling modernish with your script

The modernish installer install.sh can bundle one or more scripts with a stripped-down version of the modernish library. This allows the bundled scripts to run with a known version of modernish, whether or not modernish is installed on the user's system. Like modernish itself, bundling is cross-platform and portable (or as portable as your script is).

Bundled scripts are not modified. Instead, for each script, a wrapper script is installed under the same name in the installation root directory. This wrapper automatically looks for a suitable POSIX-compliant shell that passes the modernish battery of fatal bug tests, then sets up the environment to run the real script with modernish on that shell. Your modernish script can be run through the supplied wrapper script from any directory location on any POSIX-compliant operating system, as long as all files remain in the same location relative to each other.

Bundling is always a non-interactive installer operation, with options specified on the command line. The installer usage for bundling is as follows:

install.sh -B -D rootdir [ -d subdir ] [ -s shell ] scriptfile [ scriptfile ... ]

The -B option enables bundling mode. The option does not itself take an option-argument. Instead, any number of scriptfiles to bundle can be given as arguments following all other options. All scripts are bundled with a single copy of modernish. The bundling operation does not deal with any auxiliary files the scripts may require (other than modernish modules); any such need to be added manually after bundling is complete.

The -D option specifies the path to the bundled installation's root directory, where wrapper scripts are installed. This option is mandatory. If the directory doesn't exist, it is created.

The -d option specifies the subdirectory of the -D root directory where the bundled scripts and modernish are installed. It can contain slashes to install the bundle at a deeper directory level. The default subdirectory is bndl. The option-argument can be empty or /, in which case the bundle is installed directly into the installation root directory.

The -s option specifies a preferred shell for the bundled scripts. A shell name or a full path to a shell can be given. Wrapper scripts try the full path first (if any), then try to find a shell with its basename, and then try to find a shell with that basename minus any version number (e.g. bash instead of bash-5.0 or ksh instead of ksh93). If all that doesn't produce a shell that passes fatal bugs tests, it continues with the normal shell search.

This means the script won't fail to launch if the preferred shell can't be found. Instead, it is up to the script itself to refuse to run if required shell-specific conditions are not met. Script should use the thisshellhas function to check for any nonstandard capabilities required, or any bugs or quirks that the script is incompatible with (or indeed requires!).

Bundling is supported for both portable-form and simple-form modernish scripts. The installer automatically adapts the wrapper scripts to the form used. For simple-form scripts, the directory containing the bundled modernish core library (by default, .../bndl/bin/modernish) is prefixed to $PATH so that . modernish works. Since simple-form scripts are often more shell-specific, you may want to specify a preferred shell with the -s option.

To save space, the bundled copy of the modernish library is reduced such that all comments are stripped from the code, interactive use is not supported, the regression test suite is not included, thisshellhas does not have the --cache and --show operators, and the cap/*.t capability detection scripts are "statically linked" (directly included) into bin/modernish instead of shipped as separate files. A README.modernish file is added with a short explanation, the licence, and a link for people to get the complete version of modernish. Please do not remove this when distributing bundled scripts.

EOF