Weird back-quoting in xdg-utils-common.in

Submitted by Alexander Larsson @alexl

Assigned to Portland Bugs

Link to original bug (#107995)

Description

This code in xdg-utils-common.in seems weird: https://github.com/freedesktop/xdg-utils/blob/master/scripts/xdg-utils-common.in#L317

copied here:

elif dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.GetNameOwner string:org.gnome.SessionManager > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then DE=gnome;

Why are we running dbus-send and then executing its output, after having sent it to /dev/null.

It seems to get the right result:

$ if false > /dev/null; then echo YES; fi $ if true > /dev/null; then echo YES; fi YES

But, why?