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Re: Bash declare built-in regression loses array quotations


My scripts have been updated to account for breaking changes in Bash 4.4 and I have updated all of my Cygwin packages back to the latest version.

I am no longer receiving any assertions. Was I wrong to assume that I could selectively roll back Bash to 4.3 as I did?


Matt D.

On 1/13/2017 3:11 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
On 01/13/2017 02:00 PM, Matt D. wrote:
I updated yesterday to the latest Cygwin x86 release which included an
updated Bash 4.4.5(1). This release changes the default behavior of the
built-in 'declare' command which is causing scripts which relied on this
functionality to break.

The following test will illustrate the change:
declare -A list
list[a]=1
list[b]=2
list[c]=3
declare -p | grep list=

On Bash 4.4.5(1) the output is:
declare -A list=([a]="1" [b]="2" [c]="3" )

Previously the result was:
declare -A list='([a]="1" [b]="2" [c]="3" )'

This is an intentional upstream behavior change.  Quoting the upstream
release notes:

There are a few incompatible changes between bash-4.3 and bash-4.4.  Bash
now retains the exit status only of asynchronous jobs, as opposed to all
jobs.  This means that it is not possible to use `wait' to retrieve the
status of a previously-completed synchronous command.  Bash no longer
attempts to perform compound assignment if a variable expansion on the
right-hand side of an assignment statement to `declare' or `local' has the
form of a compound assignment.  There are other changes to compound array
assignments used as arguments to the `declare' and `local' builtins, but
those should be backwards compatible, albeit with warning messages about
deprecated constructs.  Read the descriptions of the various compatibility
options in COMPAT or the man page for more details.
...
q.  The declare builtin no longer displays array variables using the compound
     assignment syntax with quotes; that will generate warnings when re-used as
     input, and isn't necessary.

Both output forms should produce the same results when re-evaluated;
except that the form with the extra '' now issues warnings (which is why
declare -p no longer uses the extra '').


I can confirm that this has always been the expected output when running
this command on Cygwin and Linux. I run CentOS which does not track the
latest Bash release and I don't know the procedure to check whether this
is an upstream regression or not.

It's not a regression, but an intentional change; you'll have to update
your script to quit relying on unspecified output.


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