Hello all, A long-standing problem with dash has been how it deals with variable assignments in function invocations, and several packages are affected by it, two I've come across recently being autogen and pkg-config (only their test suites, luckily). A short test script: f() { echo inside f, VAR is $VAR sh -c 'echo inside sh called from f, VAR is $VAR' } VAR=value f echo after returning from f, VAR is $VAR Assuming VAR was not already set, this should print (and does with bash): inside f, VAR is value inside sh called from f, VAR is value after returning from f, VAR is With dash, this actually prints: inside f, VAR is value inside sh called from f, VAR is after returning from f, VAR is value The first problem with that is that VAR does not get exported, the second is that VAR's assigned value is kept after the function has returned. Quoting SUSv4 Shell Command Language 2.9.1 Simple Commands: If no command name results, variable assignments shall affect the current execution environment. Otherwise, the variable assignments shall be exported for the execution environment of the command and shall not affect the current execution environment (except for special built-ins). In `VAR=value f`, f is found as the command name. No exception is made for function invocations, so I believe this disallows dash's current behaviour, and requires it to print the same thing bash does. Fixing this seems trivial, see the attachment, and the test suites of both autogen and pkg-config pass with this change. Does this look correct? Cheers, Harald van Dijk