Re: [bash 4] 'test -v 1' is never true

[Chet Ramey]

On 11/25/22 4:02 PM, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I wrote a script, and am trying it on many systems.  On RHEL8, which has 
> bash 4, it didn't work.  I could reduce the problem to the following 
> command, which never returns true:
>
>      test -v 1;

This is a bash feature. I cribbed it from ksh93, and it first appeared in
bash-4.2.

The initial implementation was restricted to shell variables -- positional
parameters like $1 are not shell variables.

After a bunch of requests, like

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2018-12/msg00098.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2018-12/msg00104.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2020-01/msg00027.html

I added support for testing positional parameters in bash-5.1.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/