Re: gzip-1.3.10 test failures

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Thanks for the patches to gzip-1.3.10; I applied them and made a new
local distribution called gzip-1.3.10.p1, and then redid several
builds on each of the three systems for which I reported failure.

All builds now pass on Solaris 7 SPARC and DEC Alpha OSF/1 4.0.

The SGI IRIX MIPS builds still fail, with this complaint:

        ./zgrep -iV >/dev/null
        ./zgrep[68]: syntax error at line 4 : `)' unexpected

This appears to be a limitation of the Bourne shell on this system.

The latest bash, ksh, pdksh, and zsh releases all report output like
this:

        % pdksh zgrep -iV
        zgrep (gzip) 1.3.10
        ....

With /bin/sh, I get the above-noted failure, and turning on the
verbose flag produces this snippet:

        % sh -vx zgrep -iV
        ...
        + test 1 -ne 0
        + option=-iV
        + shift
        + optarg=
        + arg2=-'$(expr X-iVX : X-.[0-9]*\(.*\) | sed
          s/'/'\\''/g
          $s/X$/'/
        )
        + eval set -- -'$(expr X-iVX : X-.[0-9]*\(.*\) | sed
          s/'/'\\''/g
          $s/X$/'/
        ) ${1+"$@"}
        zgrep[68]: syntax error at line 4 : `)' unexpected

The problem is that the newer $(...) syntax introduced by POSIX is not
understood by older shells.  Here is a short example:

        % cat foo.sh
        #!/bin/sh

        n=$(expr 1 + 2 + 3)
        echo $n

        % sh foo.sh
        $(expr 1 + 2 + 3)

        % bash foo.sh
        6

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: address@hidden  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       address@hidden  address@hidden -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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