>Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:48:56 +0200
>From: Henk Langeveld <hlangeveld at mailworks.org>
>
>Utilities
> If the behavior required by POSIX.2, POSIX.2a, XPG4, SUS, or
> SUSv2 conflicts with historical Solaris utility behavior, the
> original Solaris version of the utility is unchanged; a new ver-
> sion that is standard-conforming has been provided in
> /usr/xpg4/bin. For applications wishing to take advantage of
> POSIX.2, POSIX.2a, XPG4, SUS, or SUSv2 features, the PATH (sh or
> ksh) or path (csh) environment variables should be set with
> /usr/xpg4/bin preceding any other directories in which utilities
> specified by those specifications are found, such as /bin,
> /usr/bin, /usr/ucb, and /usr/ccs/bin.
>
>
Note that the "historical Solaris utility behavior" in the above quote
refers to the way Solaris 2.0 /usr/bin/echo behaved (and still does
today). The POSIX standard says "If the first operand is -n, or if any
of the operands contain a <backslash> character, the results are
implementation-defined." because UNIX System V (as documented by SVID3)
and BSD had conflicting behaviors. (BSD treated -n as an option
requesting that no terminating newline be printed and SVID treated -n
as a string operand to be printed and supplied backslash escape
sequences [including \c for this case].) I.e., BSD's command:
echo -n "a\tbc\c"
would print:
ab\tc\c
with no newline at the end of the line and the same command on System
V's would print:
-n ab c
with a tab between the b and c, and no newline at the end of the line.
The difference between /usr/bin/ksh and /usr/xpg4/bin/sh versus
/usr/bin/ksh93 in the Nevada gate is that /usr/bin/ksh93's built-in
echo always produces the System V command output, but /usr/bin/sh,
/usr/bin/ksh, and /usr/xpg4/bin/sh produces the BSD output if (and only
if) /usr/ucb appears in $PATH before /usr/bin. As Roland mentioned in
an earlier message, this difference is one of many changes in behavior
that will have to be discussed before /usr/bin/sh, /usr/bin/ksh, or
/usr/bin/xpg4/bin/sh can be replaced by /usr/bin/ksh93 in a release
where backwards compatibility with prior Solaris releases is an issue.
- Don
>bugzilla-daemon at np.grommit.com wrote:
>> http://bugs.grommit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=484
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------- Comment #4 from bill.shannon at sun.com 2008-04-23 17:52 PDT -------
>> Um, I can't tell from the comments whether or not you agree that this is a
>> bug
>> that needs to be fixed.
>>
>> Anyway, "doesn't work properly" means that "echo -n foo" echoes "-n foo".
