dash arithmetic gets & operator wrong without whitespace

[Nathan Williams]

Binary package hint: dash

Evaluation of arithmetic expressions such as $((255&255)) produce an incorrect result with dash.
$ /bin/dash
$ echo $((255&255))
55
$ echo $((255&127))
27

It seems to ignore the digit immediately after the & operator. With whitespace after the &, it works properly:

$ echo $((255& 255))
255
$ echo $((255& 127))
127

This proper behavior is also seen in bash (3.2-0ubuntu18), NetBSD ash (NetBSD 4.0), and dash-0.5.3-7 (Debian).

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 8.04.1
Release: 8.04

$ apt-cache policy dash
dash:
  Installed: 0.5.4-8ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.5.4-8ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.5.4-8ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Nathan Williams (nathanw-mit)]

This is fixed in dash-0.5.5 (and thus in karmic and later), with the following change:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=utils/dash/dash.git;a=commit;h=065c7bfc0cb928e9f51ee9597d41d5604acff68a

(which was actually six months prior to my bug report).