I use Debian on most of my machines, and they all have Debian 12/stable installed on them. I have a set of scripts in a git repo that are sourced by ~/.bashrc (including on a couple Fedora machines). I'm not claiming these scripts are bug-free, but they work pretty well and haven't been significantly changed in several months. A couple days ago I discovered that one of my Debian machines was using a local-only ~/.bashrc, so I linked in this set of scripts which works fine on all the other machines. And got a syntax error, for a script line that works on all other Debian 12 machines, but not this one. I tried the single line of code on the command line and found it errors out there as well: $ gr() { grep --color=auto "$@" ; } bash: syntax error near unexpected token `(' On any other Debian machine, if I run that on the command line, it returns silently and without error. The following output is the same on both the test machines: $ echo $BASH_VERSION 5.2.15(1)-release $ echo $BASH /bin/bash I've run `set | less` and compared the $BASH* variables, and I don't see anything significant. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as this isn't making any sense to me ... -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com