Re: extension of file-test primitives?

[Eric Blake]

On 08/23/2017 10:17 AM, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 8/23/17 11:13 AM, dethrophes wrote:
>> Yhea I just learned that now, it's been at least a decade since I looked at
>> the posix spec on test.
>>
>> Should probably update the bash help to reflect that
>>
>> as help bash (in my version at least) only says
>>
>>       EXPR1 -a EXPR2 True if both expr1 AND expr2 are true.
>>       EXPR1 -o EXPR2 True if either expr1 OR expr2 is true.
> 
> Why update the help documentation? Bash supports it. It's just deprecated
> in the posix standard.

Not just deprecated, but inherently ambiguous.  There are situations
where you CANNOT tell whether the user meant -a to mean the binary
operator or a string being tested against, because POSIX (intentionally)
does not specify enough precedence rules in how to parse > 4 arguments.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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