[ksh93-integration-discuss] printf syntax and /sbin/sh compatibility

[Glenn Fowler]

On Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:39:00 +0100 Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote:
> >so even though the script has worked, it will eventually fail on
> >some conforming posix implementation

> While this is true, it proofs the point that replacing a
> script interpreter with another brings risk (and clearly also breakage).

> Since ksh93's "printf" does not accept any options, why does it parse
> the options anyway?

I sort of answered this in a previous post (our posts crossed in transit),
but just to be clear:

almost all of the ast/ksh utilities accept options in order to support
the self-documentation options provided by the ast optget(3)

the '--???' option to almost all ast/ksh utilities lists the
self-documenting options in man page format

before we did this almost all of our utility implementations (specifically
the ones *I* own) were out of sync with the man pages

ksh93 getopts uses ast optget(3), and this has saved me much grief
when revisting scripts I wrote and forgot about months/years ago

-- Glenn Fowler -- AT&T Research, Florham Park NJ --