bourne and korn shell incompatibilities

[Dave Lampe]

In article <674 at pttesac.UUCP> you write:
>
>Here's an incompatibility between ksh and sh.  With ksh, this fails
>on both the UNIX-PC and the 3B20 if there's more than one *.c file.
>Works OK with the bourne shell.

>    if [ -f *.c ];then

>Apparently the bourne shell permits a test such as

>    if [ -f abc.c def.c xyz.c ]

>probably by throwing away the def.c and xyz.c .  The korn
>shell calls it a syntax error and fails the test even if
>the first file exists.

>I realize that the bourne shell never advertised that multiple
>arguments were allowed, but it worked, I used it, ...

First this is not an undocumented feature, it is a bug in the test
builtin in sh. The documentation specificly says "-f file", the
second filename is indeed a syntax error since it is not a valid flag.
But to solve your problem, you will have to change
	if [ -f *.c ]
to
	if [ -f `ls *.c | tail -1` ]
That way test will only see 1 argument.



Dave Lampe
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