The second paragraph in section INVOCATION in bash(1) defines when the shell should be interactive. According to my tests, the most important part (/bin/bash with stdin and stdout connected to terminals) is not valid for bash. --- I run a simple executable from an xterm (or linux console): #!/bin/bash echo \"$-\" and get: $ ./interact.sh hB $ After I modify the first line to be \'#!/bin/bash -i\', I get: $ ./interact.sh bhimB $ but, according to the man-page, there should be no difference. --- bash-0:2.05a-alt2; this wasn\'t so in bash-0:2.05-alt6. glibc-2.2.5-alt10 (isatty works correctly) An issue connected to the wrong decision made by bash on whether it is interactive or not is that bash doesn\'t set $COLUMNS in most scripts.
manpage have to be updated.
Now I see that the old beahvior was not right (didn\'t conform to the man-page), because according to execve(2) a bash-script would be called like this: /bin/bash scriptname so /bin/bash has non-option arguments, and thus (according to INVOCATION) the shell should be non-interactive (even if the stdin and stdout are connected to terminals).
The man-page is correct, the beahvior conforms to the man-page, previous version of bash did it the wrong way. This is not a bug.
