Re: [PATCH v2] test_cmp: diagnose incorrect arguments

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 12:39:14PM -0400, Eric Sunshine wrote:

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 12:15 PM Eric Sunshine [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 11:37 AM Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I don't think this is an error. The program can tell which you meant by
the number of arguments. POSIX lays out some rules here (from "man
1posix test" on my system, but I'm sure you can find it online):

I intentionally didn't focus on or mention POSIX in my response
because I wanted to represent the Real World reason why "x$var" is
such a common idiom. [...]

I probably should have done a better job in my original response to
Taylor to make it clear that I was talking about Real World (even if
old) rather than POSIX.

Yeah. I guess I'm questioning how current that Real World view is. It
hasn't bitten us yet, though we do seem to do the "x" thing in some
places. And most of our shell code is in the test suite, which sees
pretty tame filenames.

-Peff