> Can you elaborate? Sure! These are my motivations behind the patch.
1) Consistency As Karl Berry stated [1], > it's common practice in the basic utility scripts to use test Also, using both '[' and 'test' in the same file is, as I see it, a bad practice. 2) No ambiguity with '[[' A lot of newcomers confuse '[' and '[[' bashism. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/306111/what-is-the-difference-between-the-bash-operators-vs-vs-vs https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12063692/vs-in-bash-shell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/669452/is-double-square-brackets-preferable-over-single-square-brackets-in-ba The struggle is real. Also, POSIX specifies that '[[' causes “unspecified results” [2]. 3) Command vs. operator For newcomers, '[' gives the illusion that it’s an operator part of the shell and not a command, which is simply wrong. This misunderstanding is enforced by the fact neither `man [` nor `man \[` bring you to the 'test' man page. > Surprisingly, [ is just another command. […] Unfortunately, many users come > across this usage first and assume the brackets are part of if itself. This > can lead to some nonsensical statements. https://thoughtbot.com/blog/the-unix-shells-humble-if#the--command This is more enforced by the fact that both `bash -c 'type ['` and `dash -c 'type ['` return “[ is a shell builtin” [3]. That being said, I must admit that it’s not easy to differentiate commands, built-ins and special built-ins [4]. For example, bash and dash do not recognise 'newgrp' as a shell built-in. Bash documentation does not list 'times' as a special built-ins [5]. Dash does not recognise 'fc' even if it should be a built-in. 4) Minimal bootstrapping I’m currently building a GNU+Linux distribution, and I’m reducing to the strict minimum the number of dependencies/commands. Right now, I’m using a subset of BusyBox instead of GNU Coreutils during the boostrap process. So I’m building BusyBox with 'CONFIG_TEST' option, which provides the 'test' command, but without 'CONFIG_TEST1' option, which extends the 'test' command to accomodate '[' and ']'. So far so good. I’ve submitted patches to CMake [6], and wrote to Paul Smith, which kindly replaced '[' by 'test' in Make source code [7]. [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2020-08/msg00004.html [2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_04 [3] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/183745/why-is-a-shell-builtin-and-a-shell-keyword [4] https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Special-Builtins.html [5] https://github.com/emersion/mrsh/pull/160 [6] https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/-/merge_requests/4704 [7] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/make.git/commit/?id=c8a6263 I hope this is convincing enough :) Cordially, Issam E. PS: This is my first patch submission to a GNU project. Big fan!
