>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Eggert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Paul> I believe negated character ranges were added to /bin/sh around
Paul> the same time as shell functions. They are definitely absent
Paul> from the Unix Version 7 sh documentation (I just checked).
Is the doc you are referring to the paper from S. Bourne? Is there
any other documentation which can be freely read we should know about
Paul> When they were added, there was some confusion as to the
Paul> notation (^ versus !).
The bad news is that at least Zsh does not understand `!', even in
`emulate sh' mode, so we have to step back :(
Paul> I would avoid them. You can use expr instead; it's portable.
Aaah! That's something I'm very happy to hear! expr has a bad
reputation, could you write down some documentation on it in
autoconf.texi, so that we learn so of its history wrt portability?
How would you write this:
case $ac_package in
[*[^-a-zA-Z0-9_]*]) AC_MSG_ERROR([invalid package: $ac_package]);;
esac
Akim
