-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 You sent mail to the obsolete bug-sh-utils; it was forwarded to the now-current bug-coreutils list instead.
According to Adam Chou on 12/8/2005 5:27 PM: > test -v, test --version, test -h, and test --help do not work. they just > return me to the command line. i have tried GNU sh-utils 2.0, coreutils > 5.2.1 and coreutils 5.0. i wasn't aware of a newer version out to try. The latest stable version of coreutils is 5.93: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-11/msg00058.html > other > people on irc have confirmed that their versions also fail to output > anything. i also specified the full path by doing /usr/bin/test but got the > same results. Careful - most shells have a builtin test, so "test --help" probably invoked the shell builtin whereas "/usr/bin/test --help" invoked the coreutils version. Now some comments on the first reply... According to The Wanderer on 12/8/2005 8:06 PM: > Since I happened to have the source sitting around, I took a look, and > apparently this is intentional for the binary named 'test'. The binary > named '[' will react correctly to both of those options if no ']' > argument is provided, but according to the source, 'test' is required by > POSIX to respond to either of those options by exiting silently with > status 1. Almost. POSIX requires "test --help" and "[ --help ]" both to exit silently with status 0 (success), since they are non-zero length one-argument expressions. > > This would appear to me to be a bug in the documentation, in that the > man pages for 'test' and '[' are identical (actually, on my system, the > latter is a symlink to the former) but their behaviour differs. I'm > not sure how best to fix it. How so? On my system, the man page lists 5 forms for the utility: test EXPRESSION test [ EXPRESSION ] [ ] [ OPTION Therefore, the ONLY way to get --help or --version (the only two supported options) is to use the spelling [, provide just one option, and omit a trailing ]. > > (Hmm. A possible unintended behaviour in 5.93: '[ ] --help', rather than > exiting silently or printing the usage message, reports "missing ']'".) > Nope, that's not a bug. Here, you have the start of a two-argument expression, but left off the trailing ]. According to the synopsis, you can only use a single option when there are no other arguments, so this is indeed a syntax error and [ is correct in reporting a missing ']'. If you do add the trailing ], as in "[ ] --help ]", you will then get a different syntax error, since ] is not a valid first token in a 2-token expression. - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDmP1184KuGfSFAYARAtqRAJ97b3y4DomhjZvkWxwAuvfgg55towCgzr8Z 9UMDixS4Y0ANatEy9gk/9B0= =H1r/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
