Any convenient way to test an executable?

[Chin Fang]

Hello, this morning I started working on a DEC 5500 running Ultrix 4.2.  I moved
over a few Bourne shell script that I wrote on other machines to this guy.

It didn't take me long to get my today's first surprise :-(.  test(1) that comes
with Ultrix doesn't do the -x thing at all!  I wonder whether anyone has a 
good suggestion as to how to deal with this simple situation?  

I certainly can use some "kludges" or learn Perl.  But now I got something I 
want to do quickly.  So learning Perl is out for the moment.

Please email your responses.  Thanks in advance for any help.

Sincerely,

Chin Fang
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
fangchin at leland.stanford.edu