Re: Bug in test (original) (raw)

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From: Bob Proulx
Subject: Re: Bug in test
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:14:09 -0700
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)

Please take care to make sure the mailing list is included in your reply so that others may share in the discussion. You can do this by using the reply-to-mailing-list function. Or lacking that use reply-to-all.

thanks for your reply, I see your point. In this case, the manpage seems to bee irritating: (Qutoing from the manpage)

SYNOPSIS

The synopsis is the part that shows how it works.

test EXPRESSION test

Neither of those show any options. So 'test' does not handle any options.

[ EXPRESSION ] [ ] [ OPTION

The last shows the OPTION listing. So (as Eric noted in his follow-up) only the '[' command can take options. But it is also a shell builtin. So you must avoid the shell's version and call out the external one explicitly.

/usr/bin/[ --version

/usr/bin/[ --help

Since both 'test' and '[' are shell builtins it is unusual to ever actually use the external ones. Most of the time the shell builtin versions will be used. That is the desirable case since it is so much faster than launching the external command. The external ones are provided so that a program (such as a C program) can exec(2) them. If they were only shell builtins then an exec(2) of them would fail. And originally they were external standalone programs so removing them would have been a regression, some decades ago.

Bob

Florian Lehmann wrote:

Hi Bob,

thanks for your reply, I see your point. In this case, the manpage seems to bee irritating: (Qutoing from the manpage)

TEST(1) User Commands TEST(1)

NAME test - check file types and compare values

SYNOPSIS test EXPRESSION test

[ EXPRESSION ] [ ] [ OPTION

DESCRIPTION Exit with the status determined by EXPRESSION.

--help display this help and exit

--version output version information and exit

In which case is test supposed to display the help when called with the option --help?

Best regards, Florian Lehmann