Bug#267142: huh?
On Sat, Sep 11, 2004 at 02:10:56AM -0700, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> > && was perfectly well-supported in the v7 Unix shell. Of course it isn't
> > typical for command arguments; that's because it isn't a command
> > argument, but an operator for joining two pipelines together.
>
> Um, but that's a totally different syntax.
Yes. I don't think Clint ever suggested that it wasn't ...
The binary 'and' and 'or' primitives available in test(1) aren't
portable, so using the alternatives provided natively in the shell is
common practice. While the syntax is different, it's not generally so
different that adapting existing scripts is painful.
> > The Autoconf manual refers (Portable Shell / Limitations of Builtins) to
> > precedence problems on System V as the rationale for avoiding -a and -o.
> > I don't see how you can logically use the behaviour of Version 7 Unix as
> > justification for anything while overlooking System V.
>
> Huh? Version 7 is the basis for BSD; System V is not.
Quite, but they're both about as relevant to the modern Debian system!
:-) (Take that as you will. Variants of both continue to exist in
production systems, and I'm pretty sure that there are still current
branches of Unix with the broken precedence of test's -a and -o
primaries. On the other hand, to a Debian-only purist neither matters.)
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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