Re: gzip-1.3.10 test failures

[Paul Eggert]

"Nelson H. F. Beebe" <address@hidden> writes:

> The problem is that the newer $(...) syntax introduced by POSIX is not
> understood by older shells.

Thanks.  Unfortunately zgrep is not easy to port to the `...` syntax
used by older shells, since it uses nested $(... $(...) ...), and
nesting `...` is a huge portability can of worms.  I could rewrite it
to use temp files instead, but I'd rather not, as temp files have
their own problems.  So I suspect we'll just have to live with gzip
not being portable to older systems that lack pre-POSIX shells.  POSIX
standardized $(...) in 1992, so I hope that assuming $(...)  is not a
problem for hosts of practical concern nowadays.

It could well be that the 'configure' is not finding a
POSIX-compatible shell on SGI IRIX MIPS, even though such a shell does
exist.  If so, we can focus on getting that to work; that should fix
the problem with zgrep.