the ``-e'' option to test

[Richard A Ryan]

Hello again,

I wrote earlier about, on Solaris 8 (with the
output of uname -a being
SunOS bevis.fsl.noaa.gov 5.8 Generic_108528-11 sun4m sparc 
SUNW,SPARCstation-20),
having problems with the -e option to the
test builtin.  It turns out that in the older
Bourne shells, test didn't have the ``-e''
option so maybe you can't depend on using it.  I
tried using test with options I was pretty sure
it didn't have and I got the same results so for
both ``test -e /tmp'' and ``test -P /tmp'', I got
the message

  /bin/sh: test: argument expected

``test -x /tmp'' didn't print any message out,
of course, it just returned the error status.

Anyway, I'm guessing that Solaris 8 is using an older
version of the Bourne shell even though their man page
for test says ``-e'' is a valid option.

Where I checked for options to test on older Bourne
shells was in the Stephen G. Kochan and Patrick H. Wood
UNIX Shell Programming, Revised Edition, 1990.  I don't
have a workable PDF reader for the Seventh Edition manual
at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/

Richard Ryan