Bourn Shell -n Flag Questions
Lowell Gilbert
freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org
Sat Apr 29 00:46:47 UTC 2006
Martin McCormick <martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu> writes:
> I read about the noexecute flag or -n flag which is supposed
> to check the syntax of a Bourn Shell script to see what it would do if
> run, but not actually do anything. This sounds like a wonderful
> thing, especially when one is going to run a dangerous script and you
> only get one chance to get it right.
>
> I tried sh -n scriptname and it always silently succeeds even
> if I type sh -x -n somescript. I even deliberately created a script
> with a syntax error in it and tried sh -x -n again. It still did
> nothing but exit. Does this just not work or am I misunderstanding
> the purpose of the flag?
I don't know where you checked the syntax of the Bourne Shell, but
FreeBSD's /bin/sh (which although not actually derived from Steve
Bourne's code does a pretty good job of covering the POSIX
requirements for sh, and a bunch of useful additions as well) is
specific to noninteractive use. According to its manual, anyway.
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