bash silently does function return on (re-)declare of global associative read-only array

Question

Obviously cut out of a much more complex script that was more meaningful:

#!/bin/bash

function InitializeConfig(){
    declare -r -g -A SHCFG_INIT=( [a]=b )
    declare -r -g -A SHCFG_INIT=( [c]=d )
    echo "This statement never gets executed"
}

set -o xtrace

InitializeConfig
echo "Back from function"

The output looks like this:

ronburk@ubuntu:~/ubucfg$ bash bug.sh
+ InitializeConfig
+ SHCFG_INIT=([a]=b)
+ declare -r -g -A SHCFG_INIT
+ SHCFG_INIT=([c]=d)
+ echo 'Back from function'
Back from function

Bash seems to silently execute a function return upon the second declare statement. Starting to think this really is a new bug, but happy to learn otherwise.

Other details:

Machine: x86_64
OS: linux-gnu
Compiler: gcc
Compilation CFLAGS:  -DPROGRAM='bash' -DCONF_HOSTTYPE='x86_64' -DCONF_OSTYPE='linux-gnu' -DCONF_MACHTYPE='x86_64-pc-linux-gn$
uname output: Linux ubuntu 3.16.0-38-generic #52~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri May 8 09:43:57 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Lin$
Machine Type: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

Bash Version: 4.3
Patch Level: 11
Release Status: release

Answer 1

I found this thread in [email protected] related to test -v on an assoc array. In short, bash implicitly did test -v SHCFG_INIT[0] in your script. I'm not sure this behavior got introduced in 4.3.

You might want to use declare -p to workaround this...

if ! declare -p SHCFG_INIT >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "looks like SHCFG_INIT not defined"