Re: A POSIX and a UTF-8 question

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2006 11:23:34 -0700 (PDT)
Daniel Qarras <dqarras@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > } - is there any documentation explaining conformance of zsh as
> > /bin/sh
> > } with the latest POSIX sh spec?
> > 
> > No, not really.  What exactly do you mean by "the latest" by the way?
> > I've been following their mailing list, and there's a new revision
> > coming up for publication later this year.
> 
> I noticed this also and that's why I was talking about the "latest and
> greatest" but of course it is more important to know conformance
> regarding to any standard version, not just the latest.

Unfortunately, the documentation is "if you start zsh in sh mode [how to
do this is in the normal documentation, at least] it sort of works most
of the time".  I'm sure there are many bits that aren't quite right, but
nobody's kept track of them all, and I don't suppose anybody's got the
time.  It's one of the disadvantages of having only a handful of us
actively maintaining the internals in our spare time.  This task
wouldn't need familiarity with the C code, though.

One recent headline feature is that in 4.3 (but not 4.2) Wayne has fixed
it so that (as far as I know) word splitting in sh mode is according to
other shells.  That has probably been the most noticeable problem in
recent years.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>
Web page now at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/p.w.stephenson/