Lexical Confusion Causes Problem
I got hit with a nasty little bug this morning. In the multi-stage processing of the app I've been working on, if we have a real show-stopped problem with one of the divisions, we don't want to run subsequent steps in the processing as we know they will be wrong, and it'll make it that much harder to fix things in the morning when I check on them. So I did something like the following:
function process_list { for div in $remaining_divisions; do if [ "`echo $failed_divisions | grep $div`" = "" ]; then # do the processing fi done }
but this gets us into problems when we have a single failed division in the first step of the processing:
failed_divisions=" charleston-wv"
and we have another division named charleston.
The grep isn't catching the distinction, and so the failure of charleston-wv is causing charleston to not complete it's processing. Crud.
The solution was to include delimiters in the name, so that a list of failed divisions is really constructed like:
for div in $remaining_divisions; do failed_divisions="$failed_divisions |$div|" done
and then the grep can be changed into the more robust:
function process_list { for div in $remaining_divisions; do if [ "`echo $failed_divisions | grep \|$div\|`" = "" ]; then # do the processing fi done }
This should keep things honest and minimize the problems of these division name collisions.