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Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 18:10:08 -0500 (EST)
From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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cc: freebsd-standards@freebsd.org
Subject: Behavior of expr(1) and standards conformance.
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<<On Wed, 10 Mar 2004 14:22:23 -0800, "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@queasyweasel.com> said:

> And they say nothing about allowing - arguments, Utility Syntax 
> Guidelines notwithstanding
> (and "guidelines" are, by definition, not necessarily universally 
> binding).

The Utility Syntax Guidelines *are* binding on all POSIX utilities
which are not otherwise so documented.  (If I had an hour to search the
documents I could quote chapter and verse on this one.)

> More to the point, The Open Group's UNIX conformance tests expect to
> be able to do stuff like this:

> 	expr -c : '\([+-]\)'

Then they are wrong, and you should file a bug report.  This issue was
the subject of an bug report against 1003.1-2001 and FreeBSD's
behavior follows the resolution of that report.

-GAWollman