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Re: Challenge: a VERY strange problem with command substitution in bash


At 07/11/2017 at 15:12, Shakespearean monkeys danced on Jürgen Wagner's keyboard and said:
...
Using backquotes instead of the command substitution with $(...) does not change the results. I could swear this did work in an earlier version of Cygwin on my Windows 7 machine.

I tried this to see if the code in the parentheses is executed at all:

$ value="$( date 2> foo | cat )"; echo "$? <$value>"

The file "foo" was not created, i.e., it seems the commands don't really get executed.

$ value="$( date && pwd )"; echo "$? <$value>"
0 <Tue Jul 11 20:49:09 CEST 2017
/home/juergen>

$ value="$( date || pwd )"; echo "$? <$value>"
0 <Tue Jul 11 20:32:27 CEST 2017>

both work, so some control structures seem to be permissible... just not a pipe.

What is going on? Some misconfiguration? A Cygwin bug? Some interaction with something weird in Windows 10? I am at loss to understand what could be wrong... and am now most curious whether anybody has an idea what is causing this. Does it work/not work in the same way in your Cygwin installation?

I came across this effect because ssh-host-config did not recognize me as administrator anymore. It's due to a check for a certain user group that uses a command substitution with a pipe. Replacing this with an equivalent command works. The original line used "id -G" and then a "grep -Eq" to check whether a certain group is on that list.

I am VERY curious now! I've rarely been puzzled that much by such a very elementary shell expression (looking back at 34 years of Unix experience).


Hi Jurgen.

90% chance it's what is called bloda in these parts. It's in the FAQ on cygwin.com. I'll go out on a limb and say you might have just installed/changed your AV/Firewall software.

And if I want to be super-psychic, can I guess comodo? Because I just changed to comodo a couple weeks ago and had the same subshell/command substitution/pipeline errors you're mentioning.

If so, you need to exclude your cygwin folder from AV scanning. AND... if the software does whitelisting or host intrusion protection (HIPS) or "run unknown executables in a container/sandbox" or something similar, you also need to trust all the executables, too. Or switch to something else that doesn't trip cygwin's trigger.

After doing that and a rebaseall, I haven't had a fork error in a week. I can't wait to run setup and come up with an update process, though...

Cheers!


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