always quote shell arguments to test -z/-n

In shell code like: test -z $foo test -n $foo that does not quote its arguments, it's easy to think that it is actually looking at the contents of $foo in each case. But if $foo is empty, then "test" does not see any argument at all! The results are quite subtle. POSIX specifies that test's behavior depends on the number of arguments it sees, and if $foo is empty, it sees only one. The behavior in this case is: 1 argument: Exit true (0) if $1 is not null; otherwise, exit false. So in the "-z $foo" case, if $foo is empty, then we check that "-z" is non-null, and it returns success. Which happens to match what we expected. But for "-n $foo", if $foo is empty, we'll see that "-n" is non-null and still return success. That's the opposite of what we intended! Furthermore, if $foo contains whitespace, we'll end up with more than 2 arguments. The results in this case are generally unspecified (unless the first part of $foo happens to be a valid binary operator, in which case the results are specified but certainly not what we intended). And on top of this, even though "test -z $foo" _should_ work for the empty case, some older shells (reportedly ksh88) complain about the missing argument. So let's make sure we consistently quote our variable arguments to "test". After this patch, the results of: git grep 'test -[zn] [^"]' are empty. Reported-by: Armin Kunaschik <megabreit@googlemail.com> Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Jeff King committed May 13, 2016 at 16:47 UTC 268ef4d3d07e4cf9909ac060b63b195509391190
3 files changed +5 -5
git-rebase--interactive.sh
+2 -2
@@ -866,12 +866,12 @@ add_exec_commands () {
866 # $3: the input filename
867 check_commit_sha () {
868 badsha=0
869 - if test -z $1
869 + if test -z "$1"
870 then
871 badsha=1
872 else
873 sha1_verif="$(git rev-parse --verify --quiet $1^{commit})"
874 - if test -z $sha1_verif
874 + if test -z "$sha1_verif"
875 then
876 badsha=1
877 fi
git-stash.sh
+2 -2
@@ -185,7 +185,7 @@ store_stash () {
185
186 git update-ref --create-reflog -m "$stash_msg" $ref_stash $w_commit
187 ret=$?
188 - test $ret != 0 && test -z $quiet &&
188 + test $ret != 0 && test -z "$quiet" &&
189 die "$(eval_gettext "Cannot update \$ref_stash with \$w_commit")"
190 return $ret
191 }
@@ -277,7 +277,7 @@ save_stash () {
277 git clean --force --quiet -d $CLEAN_X_OPTION
278 fi
279
280 - if test "$keep_index" = "t" && test -n $i_tree
280 + if test "$keep_index" = "t" && test -n "$i_tree"
281 then
282 git read-tree --reset -u $i_tree
283 fi
t/t4151-am-abort.sh
+1 -1
@@ -82,7 +82,7 @@ test_expect_success 'am -3 --abort removes otherfile-4' '
82 test 4 = "$(cat otherfile-4)" &&
83 git am --abort &&
84 test_cmp_rev initial HEAD &&
85 - test -z $(git ls-files -u) &&
85 + test -z "$(git ls-files -u)" &&
86 test_path_is_missing otherfile-4
87 '
88