On Mon, Feb 03, 2020 at 08:57:07AM +0100, Sascha Hauer wrote: > On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 02:07:59PM +0100, Uwe Kleine-König wrote: > > This makes test emit an error (and fail) on e.g. > > > > test -f > > test -f in bash returns 0 as well and also doesn't emit an error. Ah, that's because this is implicitly test -n -f That the same happens in barebox is only an accident I would say. (And note that currently test '' returns success, too, which is different from bash's test behaviour.) > > and also on unimplemented options like > > > > test -c /dev/null > > test -H /foo/bar in bash says "bash: test: -H: unary operator expected". That is (again) because "-H" "/dev/null" is implicitly "-n" "-H" "/dev/null" and then there is no sane interpretation of the last argument. test -H -a -f succeeds because both "-H" and "-f" are non-zero. I'm not sure if trying to be that clever(?) is a good idea. (Also bash's test isn't without shortages, for example $ test -f -a -a -f bash: test: argument expected while this is an obviously fine test if a file called "-a" exists and "-f" is not zero-length. Also note that coreutil's test behaves differently than bash's on for example test -f -a -f . (bash returns success, coreutil's test wails about "extra argument ‘-f’".)) > I am not sure how relevant this is, but the behaviour you introduce is > not consistent to bash. While I admit I wasn't aware how strange the other test variants are, I think trying to be as smart as bash's and coreutil's test isn't very sensible. So I think requesting that the caller explicitly uses "-n" for testing an argument for being non-empty is a sane idea. Not only because it catches (probably) errors like: somestring="" if test -n $somestring; then echo some string is nonempty; fi but also to keep the parser simpler (and the result less surprising). Best regards Uwe -- Pengutronix e.K. | Uwe Kleine-König | Industrial Linux Solutions | https://www.pengutronix.de/ | _______________________________________________ barebox mailing list barebox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/barebox
