Re: bug with 'test'

[The Wanderer]

Adam Chou wrote:

> 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. 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.

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.

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.

(Hmm. A possible unintended behaviour in 5.93: '[ ] --help', rather than
exiting silently or printing the usage message, reports "missing ']'".)

--
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Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
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