help with 'test' command (gnu, not built-in)

help with 'test' command (gnu, not built-in)

[Timothy J Luoma]

GNU utilities no longer maintain 'man' pages (thanks bunches for that,  
whoever decided on that one) so I usually use the '--help' flag.

Unfortunately I can't get anything out of GNU-test which wants

{--help}

as an argument.

These are some of the things I have tried: (zsh 3.1.4)

/usr/local/gnu/bin/test {--help}

which gives me:

/usr/local/gnu/bin/test: too many arguments
zsh: 28553 exit 1     /usr/local/gnu/bin/test - . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ;  
< = > ? @ A B C D E F G

all the rest exit with code = 0

/usr/local/gnu/bin/test \{--help\}
/usr/local/gnu/bin/test \{\-\-help\}
/usr/local/gnu/bin/test "\{\-\-help\}"
/usr/local/gnu/bin/test '{--help}'
/usr/local/gnu/bin/test "{--help}"
/usr/local/gnu/bin/test '\{--help\}'
/usr/local/gnu/bin/test "\{--help\}"

I must have something turned on that is preventing zsh from doing this  
right, or else I am dumb as a post, which is possible.

Thanks for any clues

TjL

Re: help with 'test' command (gnu, not built-in)

[Peter Stephenson]

Timothy J Luoma wrote:
> Unfortunately I can't get anything out of GNU-test which wants
> 
> {--help}

Are you sure it's not just `--help' with a funny convention for
displaying optional arguments?  If it's right as you've written it,
'{--help}' is more or less guaranteed to work (except nothing in zsh
is quite guaranteed).

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ibmth.df.unipi.it>       Tel: +39 050 844536
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/
Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarroti 2, 56127 Pisa, Italy

Re: help with 'test' command (gnu, not built-in)

[Bruce Stephens]

Peter Stephenson <pws@ibmth.df.unipi.it> writes:

> Timothy J Luoma wrote:
> > Unfortunately I can't get anything out of GNU-test which wants
> > 
> > {--help}
> 
> Are you sure it's not just `--help' with a funny convention for
> displaying optional arguments?  If it's right as you've written it,
> '{--help}' is more or less guaranteed to work (except nothing in zsh
> is quite guaranteed).

I'm sure it must be `--help' with braces just for clarity.  I don't
have GNU test installed here, but all the GNU programs I have which
accept --help, accept it just as written (and these all work fine with
zsh---zsh doesn't normally do anything special with --help, although
it's probably possible to change this), and this behaviour is in the
guidelines for GNU programs.  It would be very surprising if test was
an exception.

Re: help with 'test' command (gnu, not built-in)

[Timothy J Luoma]

	Author:	Bruce Stephens <b.stephens@isode.com>
	Date:	09 Dec 1998 11:09:09 +0000
	ID:	<vbyaoh7esq.fsf@snake.isode.com>

> It would be very surprising if test was
> an exception.

Indeed, it isn't an exception, it was pilot error.

There is some program (which one I can't recall, but common enough that it  
surprised me) where I had to escape the 'help' flag.

But it indeed wasn't 'test'

Again my body had stayed up later than my brain

TjL