Personally I think "auto-unsetting" empty vars. Is not right. Can I make a case for my opinion?

A non-existant shell variable equating to "" is not the same as the variable not existing. From what I have seen (and comments read) many programs rely on the existance tests - the test is common in most languages (is_set / is_defined / defined / etc.) as is the specific ability to unset a variable.

In fact iirc, someone was talking before about adding an unset command to maildrop (requiring parenthesis and made comment that it wouldn't be that hard.

Was this a recent addition? I've seen people stating that "X" used to work and now it doesn't... but I don't know first hand so I'm asking - is there anyone opposed to changing this behaviour?

As maildrop is not persistant (it is launched and terminated for each delivery) I don't see the benefit to this cleanup process particlarly when I consider the number of times people have to resort to calling external programs or altering programs for what appears to be a non-standard procedure.

Even standard shells avoid this (man bash AND man sh): "A parameter is set if it has been assigned a value. The null string is a valid value. Once a variable is set, it may be unset only by using the unset builtin command (see SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below)."

In SQL, "" is not NULL...

Was there a reason this was done? Does it outweigh the problems it seems to cause?

Thanks.

m/