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From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
To: Matthias Apitz <guru@unixarea.de>
References: <20101014083659.GA3150@current.Sisis.de>
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:39:13 -0400
In-Reply-To: <20101014083659.GA3150@current.Sisis.de> (Matthias Apitz's
	message of "Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:36:59 +0200")
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: gzip tries to unpack/pack 1st the filename of $GZIP
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Matthias Apitz <guru@unixarea.de> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I was facing a problem in some Makefile/shell-scripting and finally I
> could nail it down:
>
> when you set the environment variable GZIP to something, for example to
> let it point to gzip itself, it tries 1st to unpack this file:
>
> $ GZIP=/usr/bin/gzip export GZIP
> $ $GZIP -dc source.tar.gz | wc -l
> gzip: /usr/bin/gzip: not in gzip format
>   645770
>
> o
>
> $ GZIP=bla export GZIP
> $ gzip -dc source.tar.gz | wc -l
> gzip: can't stat: bla: No such file or directory
>   645770
>
> Why is this? It's not mentioned in the man page.

You need to fix the syntax on your 'export' lines.
Adding a semicolon before the "export" keyword (or
moving it to the next line) is the smallest change 
to do this.