-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Simon Josefsson on 4/1/2009 9:30 AM: >> Even though Posix says this should silently return non-zero exit status, >> some test implementations complain to stderr if the argument starts with >> something that looks like an operator or option. Hence, any time you are >> validating the contents of a variable that can be set outside of your >> control, you should always prefix it with x, to ensure that it doesn't >> start with -, (, ), etc. > > "test implementations"? If there aren't any more widely deployed > implementations out there that break (like irix, hpux or some other > system that we do support), IMO it makes the code harder to read for no > good reason and that we are better off making people stop use these test > implementations.
test(1) is often a shell builtin. And we support a wide variety of shells, very many of which do not comply with POSIX. For example, Solaris /bin/sh. This portability pitfall is documented in the autoconf manual. - -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well! Eric Blake [email protected] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAknTjWoACgkQ84KuGfSFAYAOvgCfVj7ysrMuv1AutZtGc1xsRLqS J2IAoNKVgH/cvdxPJtaE4ZfX6wjLLqD/ =Z4gs -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
