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Re: test -n STRING and test STRING differ
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From: |
Paul Eggert |
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Subject: |
Re: test -n STRING and test STRING differ |
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Date: |
Sun, 05 Sep 2004 00:35:19 -0700 |
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User-agent: |
Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux) |
Dan Jacobson <jidanni@jidanni.org> writes:
> The docs make it look like test -n STRING and test STRING do the
> same. However,
> $ /usr/bin/test ``; echo $?
> 1
> $ /usr/bin/test -n ``; echo $?
> 0
> $ test ``; echo $?
> 1
> $ test -n ``; echo $?
> 0
Those test cases are misleading, since they use ` (accent grave)
instead of ' (apostrophe). The accent grave characters vanish before
"test" is invoked, so the tests are actually comparing "test" (with no
arguments) to "test -n". The behavior you're observing conforms to
POSIX, so I don't see any bug.