Re: How do I make a portable test??

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 02:11:37AM +0000, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
> "test: ==: unexpected operator" on a Sun running NetBSD 1.6 

"==" is indeed unexpected :-)  Bourne shell doesn't support it; I
don't believe ksh does either.  It looks like a bash extension,
in which shell it does pattern matching.  (Even the standalone
/usr/bin/test on my Mandrake 7.2 box doesn't support "=="; only
bash's built-in "test" does.)

Use "=" or "!=" for string comparison; for numeric comparison the
operators are:
        -eq -ne -gt -ge -lt -le

> The section below between the two rows of stars works fine on a Sun
> workstation running Solaris 9 (tcsh shell), a Sun workstation running
> Debian Linux (bash shell), a PC running Redhat 7.3 Linux (tcsh shell),

I bet the Solaris box has bash installed -- and as /bin/sh too!
Linux systems typically have bash as /bin/sh, so the script's
success there is unsurprising.

By "(tcsh shell)" I presume you mean it's your login shell.
That's irrelevent; what matters is the one named in the script's
"#!" line.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
A distributed system is one on which I cannot get any work done,
because a machine I have never heard of has crashed.
        - Leslie Lamport