edwards@felix.UUCP (08/15/83)
I haven't always kept up with unix-wizards, so this may be an old topic, but I'm curious to hear what anyone knows about this. I was recently helping someone here debug a (Bourne) shell script which made use of the "test" program. It didn't seem to work. I wound up reading the source code, and concluded that I couldn't understand how the program could POSSIBLY perform as the manual advertises. The problem shows up with any expressions more complex than the most trivial (although I suspect the usage of "test" with complex expressions is rare). Among other things, the syntax parsed by the program does not seem to correspond to the syntax described in the manual, and the program doesn't seem to handle parenthesized subexpressions correctly. Although this is not of pressing importance (the problem can be circumvented) it would be surprising to me to find that a program like that had survived this long without working right. Am I missing either a later distribution of the program or some of my marbles? We are running 4.1BSD. Thanks in advance, Dave Edwards {ucbvax, decvax, ...}!trw-unix!felix!edwards