gzip tries to unpack/pack 1st the filename of $GZIP

[Lowell Gilbert]

Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I was facing a problem in some Makefile/shell-scripting and finally I
> could nail it down:
>
> when you set the environment variable GZIP to something, for example to
> let it point to gzip itself, it tries 1st to unpack this file:
>
> $ GZIP=/usr/bin/gzip export GZIP
> $ $GZIP -dc source.tar.gz | wc -l
> gzip: /usr/bin/gzip: not in gzip format
>   645770
>
> o
>
> $ GZIP=bla export GZIP
> $ gzip -dc source.tar.gz | wc -l
> gzip: can't stat: bla: No such file or directory
>   645770
>
> Why is this? It's not mentioned in the man page.

You need to fix the syntax on your 'export' lines.
Adding a semicolon before the "export" keyword (or
moving it to the next line) is the smallest change 
to do this.