Ahh. That makes sense. Interesting bit of history there. The x in the left side of the evuation is what threw me. I didn't think that would even be legal syntactically, but those explanations make a lot of sense.
- James -----Original Message----- From: Christian Franke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 3:38 AM To: The development of GRUB 2 <grub-devel@gnu.org> Subject: Re: Problem in configure Clemens Helfmeier wrote: > This is a shell thing. It just ensures that the evaluation does not > result in if test = xno; then > (in case the variable is empty) and thus throw an error. with "x" it > its like this for an empty variable > if test x = xno; then > which would work fine for shells. > BTW: This is not necessary if the expanded argument is quoted like in the original example. Instead of test "x$foo" = "xno" it is OK to use: test "$foo" = "no" or test "$foo" = no which is IMO more easy to read. For an unset/empty variable, this expands to test "" = no which does not throw an error. The leading 'x' was probably necessary for very ancient shells with broken evaluation of quoted empty argument. [The entire original message is not included] _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
