Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 450426
better environment handling for nash
Last modified: 2009-05-06 11:12:54 EDT
Description of problem: Current nash does very lame environment variable substitutions. With a tiny amount of work, this can be improved enormously. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): mkinitrd-6.0.19-4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. export HOST=xyz 2. In nash script: "echo abc${HOST}def" 3. In nash script: "echo $HOST" Actual results: 2. abc${HOST}def 3. xyz Expected results: 2. abcxyzdef 3. xyz Additional info: Given that grub boot parameters that are not interpreted by kernel are passed through to the environment, it can sometime be useful for nash to be able to use these during early init. For example, if a boot string has "kernel ... root=LABEL=/ HOST=myhost", then nash's environment will contain "HOST=myhost". And it is therefore possible to massively reconfigure an entire root filesystem, specialized for a particular host, by simply having nash do "ln -s xxx xxx.$HOST" or similar init script. Very useful for people maintaining a large number of machines configured in a number of distinct ways. Boot off dvd and just chose the target HOST at boot. Come to think of it, why does nash exist at all? What is wrong with bash?
Created attachment 308636 [details] patch to improve nash's environment substitutions
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nash is going away as we move to dracut; making big changes to allow more variable substitution isn't going to happen at this point