ken wrote:
I vote to stay with backticks. We've maintained (or at least tried to
maintain) Bourne shell throughout the rest of nmh, and I think we
should keep it that way.
Officially, $(...) is part of POSIX; it's not a Bash-ism.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html
And, in fact, it was part of the POSIX.2 standard of 1994, 27 years ago:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009656399/toc.pdf (p.36)
We USED to use $(...) in the test suite. But that was dropped because
it turns out that /bin/sh on Solaris does not support that (at least, that
was my memory). I am neutral about whether or not we should continue
to support ancient shells.
I suspect anyone still running Solaris has long ago figured out how
to deal with "modern" shell features creeping into their ecosystem.
But how old, exactly, does a Solaris system need to be to not be
running a POSIX compliant shell?
I'm fine with not relying on GNU-isms, and I think we should avoid
the cutting edge in general, but in this case, I think we can take
a step forward. If we get complaints, I'll be happy to revert to
backticks.
paul
=----------------------
paul fox, pgf(_at_)foxharp(_dot_)boston(_dot_)ma(_dot_)us (arlington, ma, where
it's 55.0 degrees)