Excerpts from Andreas Schwab's message of Sat Oct 10 08:24:40 -0400 2009:
According to the autoconf docs this bug is also present in the Solaris
/bin/sh (and autoconf generated scripts use some elaborated workaround).
Solaris' /bin/sh shouldn't be used for anything but forking a decent
shell, imo. It was brought to my attention recently that the test
suite for mercurial on solaris was failing the git tests. The
mercurial folks initially thought this was a git on solaris bug.
After looking into it, I discovered that ^ is still treated[1] as a
pipe symbol[2] in some cases. So, test suite programs run under
/bin/sh on solaris with commands like `git reset --hard HEAD^` were
misbehaving due to the shell setting up a pipeline under the right
circumstances.
-Ben
[1] http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/sh/cmd.c
line 184
[2] This dates back to the Thomson shell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_shell
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
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