> Who guarantees you that ksh supplies TMOUT? OTOH, TMOUT is not in any > way restricted, so a user (more likely: a sysadmin) could set and export > it, and reasonably so: every Posix shell understands it, bash included. I tested that both ksh and pdksh set TMOUT = 0 at startup, for example: $ ksh [033]0;h - w007]h:w u$ unset TMOUT [033]0;h - w007]h:w u$ ksh -c "echo \$TMOUT" 0 bash, zsh, ash/dash do not. > And since when are 2 forks a suitable tradeoff for portability? It's just a guard to avoid unnecessary tests, like test "${TMOUT+set}" = set && (...) 2>/dev/null It's not affecting portability. > Should we document $TMOUT as a reliable way to detect ksh, the way we already > use {BASH,ZSH}_VERSION as reliable witnesses of those two shells? Maybe; in any case, if we aren't saying it already we should point out that they can be exported and this affects the tests. Paolo _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf