Elia Pinto wrote: > Even though POSIX.1 lists -a/-o as options to "test", they are > marked "Obsolescent XSI". Scripts using these expressions > should be converted as follow: [... many lines snipped ...] This is a very long description, and it doesn't leave me excited by the change. Is there some potential bug this prevents, or is it just a style fix? If the latter, do we have a way of checking for new examples of the same thing to avoid having to repeat the same patch again in the future? Are there any platforms that were broken which this fixes? Even posh seems to understand -a and -o. Nowadays Documentation/CodingGuidelines says - Fixing style violations while working on a real change as a preparatory clean-up step is good, but otherwise avoid useless code churn for the sake of conforming to the style. "Once it _is_ in the tree, it's not really worth the patch noise to go and fix it up." Cf. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/943020 which I think goes too far (some patterns really are error prone or distracting and it can be worth fixing them tree-wide), but it makes a reasonable case that an idiom not being preferred in the style guide is not *on its own* enough reason to change it. Perhaps something like the following would work? tree-wide: convert test -a/-o to && and || The interaction with unary operators and operator precedence for && and || are better known than -a and -o, and for that reason we prefer them. Replace all existing instances in git of -a and -o to save readers from the burden of thinking about such things. Add a check-non-portable-shell.pl to avoid more instances of test -a and -o arising in the future. [...] > - test $status = D -o $status = T && echo "$sm_path" && continue > + ( test $status = D || test $status = T ) && echo "$sm_path" && continue There's no need for a subshell for this. Better to use a block: { test "$status" = D || test "$status" = T } && echo "$sm_path" && continue or an if statement: if test "$status" = D || test "$status" = T then echo "$sm_path" continue fi or case: case $status in D|T) echo "$sm_path" continue ;; esac Hope that helps, Jonathan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html