Shell Programming and Scripting

busybox bash is not bash, not even if it calls itself that. That's just a convenience alias to a more limited shell.

Install bash.

Code:

LibreELEC:~ # /bin/bash /storage/.config/test
/storage/.config/test: line 46: syntax error: unexpected "(" (expecting "}")

That's what I wrote in my second post.

I only said that bash is installed
but after I read Corona's comment

I doublechecked and bash --version really results in an empty line.
So is it true that busybox offers a fake bash command? That's irritating (as well as the error message)

LibreElexc is compiled from scratch, where the contend is controlled by package descriptions. There definitely is a package for bash 4.3.46 but obviously it wasn't compiled and installed. I'll have to look into this.

So if this

Code:

Currently defined functions:
        ar, arch, arp, arping, ash, awk, basename, bash

is just a limited bash version and there is no way to change the code of the script because busybox offers no arrays then this problem should be "solved". Learning never stops.
I thank you all for your efforts and useful contributions.

It's kind of a "boy who cried wolf" situation. bash and sh are so synonymous in the linux world, it's difficult to convince authors to type #!/bin/sh whenever #!/bin/bash wasn't needed. On many systems, they're the exact same thing anyway, they have no "minimal" shell to even test with.

But in a system with 2 megs of storage and 4 megs of RAM, bash is a "hog". Many hundreds of kilobytes could be saved by using a more minimal shell. So they install busybox, plus the link to make these "bash" scripts run on vanilla sh, which is usually enough to work, sometimes with a minor modification or two.

Of course, on the rare occasion these "bash" scripts actually need bash, you get this.

I fully understand why busybox is used on systems like JustEnoughOSes, after all that's the reason why I use LibreElec.
But it would be very helpfull if at least error messages would give a tiny hint that it's busybox that produces that error and not bash. It's not obvious that if you type an explicit command like /bin/bash that you end up in a "fake" version.
But that' another story.

I fully agree with you there. Note that if you were using a real bash, any diagnostic messages that it produces would include "bash:" at the start of the message. For example if I issue the command:

Code:

bash -c 'for i in *;do { cat "$i'

on macOS, I get two diagnostics:

Code:

bash: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"'
bash: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file

each of which clearly indicates that the diagnostic came from bash (the first indicating that it is looking for a missing <double-quote> character and the second indicating that it is looking for a missing } and/or a missing done). This is why we asked you to be sure that you were showing us the exact, complete diagnostic messages you were getting when you reported the problem.

If the tools provided by busybox don't do that for you, you'll have a hard time trying to guess if the diagnostics you're seeing are coming from the shell or from one of the utilities invoked by the shell. This makes diagnosing problems in an environment like that much more difficult for you. I wish you luck.

Thanks.
I will need it ;)