On 17 August 2015 at 01:42, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> wrote:
| From: Chris F.A. Johnson <chris@cfajohnson.com>
| Best practice is not to use it at all. | | <http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105>
Sorry, late to this thread, but that page doesn't refer to -u
Thanks. Useful. I respectfully disagree with the conclusion.
| > "set -u" tells the shell to treat a reference to an undefined | > parameter as an error. It will make no difference in this script. | > Until the script evolves more complexity. | | There's no point to using set -u after a script has been debugged.
The sad fact is that I don't know when I've gotten rid of the last bug in a script.
I don't know when I've gotten the last bug in *any* language (of course I've only been programming for 44 years, so maybe I'll get to that point sometime :-). The only reason I can even *imagine* turning it off after "debugging" would be a claim for "efficiency". And to suggest that "the overhead of having the bash interpreter check this" is material is misguided (see Hugh's quotes from Tony Hoare). There are *very*, *very* few programs that need that kind of micro-efficiency, which is why I virtually never program in C or C++ anymore -- safety is so much more important. ../Dave