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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Is Rule 7 of POSIX shell grammar rules written correctly? Post 302978852 by Mark_Galeck on Thursday 4th of August 2016 06:25:12 PM
Old 08-04-2016
Is Rule 7 of POSIX shell grammar rules written correctly?

The POSIX shell standard grammar rules are at

Shell Command Language

I am trying to understand Rule 7 and I don't. I think there may be some mistakes there. I am not complaining about the standard; rather, I am concerned that my perception is wrong, and I don't understand something important.

Here are my questions. Please tell me for each question, if the standard is simply written incorrectly, or what is it that I don't understand.

1. Rule 7 is only referenced with yacc symbols cmd_name and cmd_word, not with any symbols that have to do with assignments, yet it is labeled "Assignment preceding command name". Is that a misleading label ?

2. Rule 7a for the first word, in some cases refers to Rule 7b, which is labeled "not the first word". Is that a misleading label ?

3. The yacc symbol cmd_word refers to rule 7b, which says, if the word contains '=' after its first character, then it is an assignment - and not anything to do with a command. Should rule 7b simply state that it is not allowed to have '=' after the first character?

4. Rule 7a is only referenced during parsing simple commands, which cannot have any reserved words in them. Yet Rule 7a in some cases refers to Rule 1, which differentiates between a reserved word and ordinary word.

If there is no possibility of having a reserved word in Rule 7a, there would be no point to refer to any additional Rule 1 at all. Then, there would be no point in having a separate Rule 7a at all. That is because, if the word did not contain '=', Rule 7b says nothing, so we have WORD, and if it did contain '=', then 7b applies. Thus we would only need 7b. Then also, there would be no need for cmd_name symbol, we could just have cmd_word.

Is Rule 7a and cmd_name symbol needed?

Moderator's Comments:
Mod Comment edit by bakunin: made the link working.
 

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File::Find::Object::Rule::Extending(3pm)		User Contributed Perl Documentation		  File::Find::Object::Rule::Extending(3pm)

NAME
File::Find::Object::Rule::Extending - the mini-guide to extending File::Find::Object::Rule SYNOPSIS
package File::Find::Object::Rule::Random; use strict; use warnings; # take useful things from File::Find::Object::Rule use base 'File::Find::Object::Rule'; # and force our crack into the main namespace sub File::Find::Object::Rule::random () { my $self = shift()->_force_object; $self->exec( sub { rand > 0.5 } ); } 1; DESCRIPTION
File::Find::Object::Rule inherits File::Find::Rule's extensibility. It is now possibile to extend it, using the following conventions. Declare your package package File::Find::Object::Rule::Random; use strict; use warnings; Inherit methods from File::Find::Object::Rule # take useful things from File::Find::Object::Rule use base 'File::Find::Object::Rule'; Force your madness into the main package # and force our crack into the main namespace sub File::Find::Object::Rule::random () { my $self = shift()->_force_object; $self->exec( sub { rand > 0.5 } ); } Yes, we're being very cavalier here and defining things into the main File::Find::Object::Rule namespace. This is due to lack of imaginiation on my part - I simply can't find a way for the functional and oo interface to work without doing this or some kind of inheritance, and inheritance stops you using two File::Find::Object::Rule::Foo modules together. For this reason try and pick distinct names for your extensions. If this becomes a problem then I may institute a semi-official registry of taken names. Taking no arguments. Note the null prototype on random. This is a cheat for the procedural interface to know that your sub takes no arguments, and so allows this to happen: find( random => in => '.' ); If you hadn't declared "random" with a null prototype it would have consumed "in" as a parameter to it, then got all confused as it doesn't know about a '.' rule. NOTES ABOUT THE CALLBACK
The callback can access the File::Find::Object::Result using "$self->finder->item_obj()". AUTHOR
Richard Clamp <richardc@unixbeard.net> COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2002 Richard Clamp. All Rights Reserved. This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. SEE ALSO
File::Find::Object::Rule File::Find::::Rule::MMagic was the first extension module for File::Find::Rule, so maybe check that out. perl v5.14.2 2012-05-05 File::Find::Object::Rule::Extending(3pm)
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