[BusyBox] ash / busybox problems?

[David Douthitt]

It must be one of the two - I can't imagine what else would cause this:

To generate the symptoms, do the following:

# echo $HOSTNAME
red
# H="$HOSTNAME:" && echo $H
redu:
# H="$HOSTNAME/" && echo $H
redu/
# H="$HOSTNAME+" && echo $H
red+
# H=$HOSTNAME/ && echo $H
red/
#

The extraneous letter is the "u" with an umlaut (double-dot) above it -
and this extraneous letter is always the same.  The symptoms are always
generated within quotes, and always with punctuation after the
variable.  The special characters that will generate this are:

~ / : ! - [ ] * ? \ =

The special characters that DO NOT generate any erroroneous output are:

; ` $ _ < > { } $ ^ % & . , " ' | +

Note I am *NOT* using the busybox shell; there are only two reasons I
post this here:

* ash seems to be (in some capacity) under Erik's eye
* this system just had busybox upgraded to 0.50pre

However, I don't see how busybox itself can cause this, but it never
happened before.  I don't know what triggered this all of a sudden.