Portability problems of "Usual Tools" not described in manual

[Russ Allbery]

(This is Debian bug http://bugs.debian.org/466990 against the autoconf-doc
Debian package.)

Attached is a bug report from a Debian user that notes some additional
shell portability issues that aren't included in the Autoconf 2.63
documentation.  (I have not personally verified the reported behavior.)

I'd appreciate it if you would cc address@hidden on
replies so that the reply will also be added to the Debian bug.  Thanks!

> --- Begin Message ---
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> Subject: 
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> autoconf-doc: Portability problems of "Usual Tools" not described in manual
>
>
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>
> Date: 
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> Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:05:35 +0100
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>
> User-agent: 
>
> Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux)
>
>
>
>
> Package: autoconf-doc
> Version: 2.59-2
> Severity: minor
>
> While working on a larger shell script that has portability requirements,
> I came across the following portability issues not described in the
> Autoconf manual:
>
> 1. sed behaves entirely unpredictable on lines that are not newline-terminated.
>    Some implementations pass the line through unchanged, some append a newline,
>    some do not print the line at all:
>
>    On GNU/Linux:
>
>      bash-3.1$ echo -n foo | sed -n p
>      foobash-3.1$
>
>    On SUN Solaris 2.10:
>
>      bash-3.1$ echo -n foo | sed -n p
>      bash-3.1$
>
>    On AIX 6.1:
>
>      bash-3.1$ echo -n foo | sed -n p
>      foo
>      bash-3.1$
>
>    This does not only hold for the "p" command, but also for (seemingly) all
>    others.
>
> 2. On HP-UX 11.23, regexp matching with expr does not allow multiple sub-
>    expressions:
>
>      bash-3.1$ expr 'Xfoo' : 'X\(f\(oo\)*\)$'
>      expr: More than one '\(' was used.
>
>    On most other OSs the result is as expected:
>
>      bash-3.1$ expr 'Xfoo' : 'X\(f\(oo\)*\)$'
>      foo
>
> 3. On GNU/Linux the regexp "$", when used with older versions of expr,
>    matches newlines embedded in the match string:
>
>      bash-3.1$ baz='foo
>      > bar'
>      bash-3.1$ expr "X$baz" : 'X\(foo\)$' || echo baz
>      foo
>
>    On most other OSs and on recent versions of GNU expr the result is as
>    expected:
>
>      bash-3.1$ expr "X$baz" : 'X\(foo\)$' || echo baz
>
>      baz
>
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 3.1
> Architecture: i386 (i686)
> Kernel: Linux 2.6.11-5
> Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)
>
> -- no debconf information
>
> --- End Message ---