Package: mksh Version: 54-2 Severity: wishlist Tags: upstream Dear Maintainer,
thank you for your work on mksh. As for my reading of http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/alias.html, the behaviour of alias in mksh is not compliant when passed a not-existent alias. With bash 4.4-1 (as comparison): $ alias somecmd STDOUT: (nil) STDERR: -bash: alias: somecmd: not found RETCOD: 1 With mksh 54-2: $ alias somecmd STDOUT: somecmd alias not found STDERR: (nil) RETCOD: 0 The Open Group Specifications says: * STDOUT | The format for displaying aliases (when no operands or only name | operands are specified) shall be: | | "%s=%s\n", name, value As the alias was undefined, I think the bash behaviour (no STDOUT) is correct. * STDERR | The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages. Again, the bash behaviour seems more reasonable to me. * EXIT STATUS | The following exit values shall be returned: | | 0 Successful completion. | >0 One of the name operands specified did not have an alias | definition, or an error occurred. If I'm understanding it correctly, returning 0 in this context is a violation of this specification. Thank you, Gian Piero. -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.8.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) Versions of packages mksh depends on: ii libc6 2.24-5 Versions of packages mksh recommends: ii ed 1.10-2.1 mksh suggests no packages. -- no debconf information
