Bug#256732: [Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#256732: Bug report confirmed and ACK'ed

[Alexander Gattin]

Hello, Christian!

On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 10:45:41PM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> David,
> 
> Thanks for the patch you provided in #256732 about bashisms and best
> grep use in shadow's maintainer scripts.
> 
> We will apply this patch in later development of the package as I
> haven't seen any reason not to do so.

I don't know what was the intent of turning egrep into
"grep -E" (possible drop of "egrep/fgrep" support after
several hundreds of years?:)) but taking that step, we
maybe should also replace "grep -E" with just "grep"
where possible (i.e. where there is an obvious _basic_
regexp [without extended features]).

Some regexps there are extended, contrary to what Karl
stated in his comment. And, by the way, I think that
having:
>	# Assume there is a root password if NIS is being used.
>	if egrep -q '^+:' /etc/passwd; then
is a plain bug, because intent of that code is to match
literal "+:" at the beginning of line (AFAIK), but the
"+" symbol is treated as metacharacter in extended regexp
context.
That's why "egrep -q '^[+]:'" or "grep -q '^+:'" _must_
be used here instead.

IMHO we need to examine the scripts affected (and the
patch) more thoroughly...

BTW, the patch already contains the changes I proposed
to remove-shell/add-shell scripts (namely the
"#!/bin/bash -e" --> "#!/bin/sh -e" move).

-- 
WBR,
xrgtn