Glenn Fowler wrote: > On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:07:46 +0100 Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote: > > The standard does NOT require an argument of the form -------- to elicit > > an error. > > right > there are conforming implementations > and conforming applications > > solaris and ast/ksh printf are conforming implementations > > printf ----- is a non-conforming application > > non-conforming means non-portable > the reality is most people code to eliminate diagnostics > but that is not sufficient to "guarantee" conformance > > we can workaround the printf problem by issuing a warning > diagnostic for invalid option (its currently an error with > non-0 exit status) and treat the option and all subsequent > operands as operands [snip]
AFAIK this is not neccesary nor allowed. The "printf" utilty is (AFAIK) expected to return non-zero exit codes if any invalid/unsupported options are passed as arguments before "--". Changing this may break the test suites (see http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=502) and that would violate the ARC stabilty status of /usr/bin/printf which says: -- snip -- ATTRIBUTES See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attri- butes: ________________________________________________________ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | |_________________________|_____________________________| | Availability | SUNWloc | |_________________________|_____________________________| | CSI | enabled | |_________________________|_____________________________| | Interface Stability | Standard | |_________________________|_____________________________| -- snip -- IMO it's better to rely on the standard in this case and not on what people think how the standard may look like... we already have enougth utilities in /usr/bin/ which behave like that (that's why Solaris has /usr/xpg4/bin/ and /usr/xpg6/bin/ ... ;-( )... ;-( ---- Bye, Roland -- __ . . __ (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090 (;O/ \/ \O;)
