Re: Bug with 'test' built-in.

[mwoehlke]

Paul Jarc wrote:
> mwoehlke <mwoehlke@tibco.com> wrote:
> > I *know* '! [ -a file ]' is not portable. I tried to use it in some 
> > script, somewhere, at some time, and it was sometimes treated as history 
> > expansion.
>
> Quoting the "!" would take care of that particular problem, but there
> are some older shells, like Solaris /bin/sh, where the "!" command
> doesn't exist at all, so if this script will have to run in anything
> but bash, it'd still be good to use one of the other methods.

Hehe, yeah, I have to maintain scripts that run under "/bin/sh" on... 
oh, about nine different platforms. :-) That's always a frustrating 
exercise in portability, and not just w.r.t. the shell. For instance, 
there is one script that breaks with certain non-GNU versions of 'awk' 
and 'tail', and there have been plenty of times I've put in conditional 
code. Heck, I've even done conditional code based on the version of 
bash! :-)

--
Matthew
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