ksh93: "$*" joins positional parameters on the first byte of $IFS instead of first character about ast HOT 1 CLOSED

On the release version (2012-08-01), expanding "$*" while IFS contains a UTF-8 character corrupts ksh93's shell-quoting mechanism, so that anything that produces output suitable for re-entry into the shell has the final quote missing -- even after IFS is restored.

This appears to be fixed on the current beta (2014-12-24), at least as compiled on Linux.

On the release version, the behaviour is as follows:

$ ksh -c 'i=$IFS; IFS=é; set : :; echo "$*"; IFS=$i; trap "echo end" EXIT; trap'
:?:
trap -- 'echo end EXIT
end

Note the missing quote after trap -- 'echo end. You get the same with the output of export -p, alias, etc.

Even using a subshell doesn't avoid the corruption (yay non-forking subshells). However, setting and then unsetting LC_ALL=C seems to be an effective workaround:

$ ksh -c 'IFS=é; set : :; echo "$*"; trap "echo end" EXIT; LC_ALL=C; unset LC_ALL; trap'
:?:
trap -- 'echo end' EXIT
end

from ast.