Shell Programming and Scripting

I have an interesting one for the gurus out there that may have an idea as to why this is happening. We're currently migrating from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10 and we've run into a very strange issue. There are a bunch of shell scripts people have written throughout a directory that are used for particular systems that have code in there that directs output to /dev/null/ (notice the trailing slash). I suspect this started from someone making the mistake and then copying it through other scripts. e.g.

Code:

echo "bla" > /dev/null/

I understand that this is wrong syntax however on Solaris 9, using all shells, it allows this to go through. Actually, I can put as many trailing slashes as I went (e.g. /dev/null////) and it will just ignore. On Solaris 10, however, it will error out with "Is not a directory". Also, on other Linux/UNIX distros it errors out with the same behavior.

I am probably just going to recursively replace these instances with proper formed code however I'm just wondering if someone has any thoughts on this.

Perhaps you could correct all the scripts at once (test it out first):

Code:

perl -i -pe 's|/dev/null/|/dev/null|g' *.sh

Code:

perl -i -pe 's|(?<=/dev/null)/||g' *.sh

This discusses what is allowed for pathanmes by POSIX:

General Concepts

Trailing slash resolution is implementation defined.

I read:

I see...so previous versions of Solaris could implement pathname resolution in such a way that trailing slashes are ignored in this manner. I've just found out that our developers even have it specified in their strcopy functions in their C utilities. E.g. they have shell commands with a trailing slash when doing redirect, e.g.:

Code:

strcpy(tmp, "rm -f bla.tmp 2> /dev/null/");

I actually can't find any other Linux/Unix system available to me at the moment that allows this sort of behaviour except our Solaris 9 machines...

Very very frustrating and going to mean a lot of sophisticated search and replace commands and recompiling for the guys to have this working. The annoying thing is that I know the proper thing to do is push them back on this however if only there was some way of hacking around this initially.

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