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

[Matthias Apitz]

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.
Thanks

	matthias
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Matthias Apitz
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