On 05/18/2018 05:42 PM, Ben Elliston wrote:
${parameter:-word} is in POSIX, but I don't know how portable it is to
old Bourne shells. Paul?
Although it does not work on old Bourne shells, I suspect we don't need
to worry about them any more.
The "Shellology" section of the Autoconf manual says ${VAR:-VALUE}
causes old BSD shells to complain and die, and mentions Ultrix. However,
as far as I know these old shells are now museum pieces. The last Ultrix
release was in 1995. I haven't fielded an Ultrix bug report for many years.
For what it's worth, 'configure' scripts are still portable to Ultrix
because they search for a POSIX-compatible shell by trying a list of
programs that includes 'sh5', which was how Ultrix did it. I think this
was due to the late Fred Canter, who specialized in getting the farkles
out. See:
Hall J. The last farkle. Linux J. 2007-12-02.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005779
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