> Is there any consnsus among shell developers what the preferrd > behaviour is?
I think it should match /bin/test, since making test a shell builtin is supposed to be just an optimization. (Incidentally, this means that, from this point of view, as you described it, bash on NetBSD is buggy.) Arranging that, when sh and test are not maintained together, is admittedly...difficult. In NetBSD's case, of course, this is less difficult; perhaps an automated test to verify that /bin/test and the shell builtin work the same way would be good? As for which behaviour - whether shell builtin or /bin/test - is better? I'm not sure. There are four existence cases: first file existing or not, cross product with second file existing or not. I agree that the case you started off asking about is the only interesting one; if the first file doesn't exist, I'd say the test is false regardless of whether the second file exists, and if they both exist, it depends on the timestamps. Personally, I'd tend to treat a nonexistent second file as an infinitely old second file: -nt is true and -ot is false. Just to complicate things, you/we might arguably want A -nt B to be the same as B -ot A, which disagrees with the above two paragraphs. > At least, I think sh's behaviour should be documented (if only in the > sense that it's undefined). That, I totally agree with. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
