[Groff] serious pdfroff problems

[Werner LEMBERG]

Keith,


according to Nelson's log files which I now have analyzed completely,
many platforms refuse to run the pdfroff script.

One platform fails with

  ./pdfroff: 561: Syntax error: "}" unexpected (expecting "fi")

This is definitely a bug of the platform's shell (either tcsh or ksh),
but should be easy to fix.

Many other platforms fail with

  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  ./pdfroff: : cannot execute
  ./pdfroff: --style: not found
  pdfroff: unknown option '--style=./cover.ms'

which is probably another shell bug.  [Nelson is away for almost two
weeks, so I can't ask him to run tests manually.]  I think that the
offending line is

  MATCH="$MATCH`echo --$OPT | $GREP "^$OPTNAME"`"

I suspect that the

  "...`..."..."`"

combination causes the problem.

Can you reformulate those two expressions?  I want to prepare another
pretest in the next few days which Nelson can then run again on his OS
zoo.


    Werner