My understanding is that [ and test have been synonyms for a long time, Well, they were always "synonyms" in the sense that they were (typically, at least) hard links to each other. But the behavior obviously differs; [ has to strip a trailing ] argument. There were bugs in that parsing on some systems in the 1980's, when this stuff was getting developed. Using test avoided the bugs. primarily because test is less likely to mess up quoting rules in autoconf macros. A good reason to prefer test. Since there is no reason to prefer [, it is good to keep using test, because of the quoting, and for consistency with all the existing code that does so. so that you should not have any worries about interchanging them today on any practical porting target. Agreed. karl _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf