> > I'm pretty new to shell programming and the behavior required by POSIX > > makes no > > sense to me at all .... how could i ever trust in expr with unknown numbers?
Indeed. Sometimes you just can't trust decisions set in stone by POSIX. Sometimes they are just plain broken. If an architecture with a strangely-sized "long" showed up, ksh would have to behave differently again. What are you going to do about it? Complain to the masterminds behind POSIX?
