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This is a bug because the downside of this behaviour is outweighed by some tiny upside.

But I've never seen a person editing a bash script without an editor that swaps in a new version of the file until today, so never knowingly encountered this bug before.

It should be fixed.

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I don't think that's how you define a bug. I think technically you could argue its a "logical error", however that assumes that you know the intent of the creator of bash was specifically to not allow this behavior which I don't think is the case.

If nearly everyone doesn't expect the behaviour, and the behaviour has a serious downside, it's a bug.

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