>Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:05:49 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Roger Marquis <marquis@xxxxxx>
>
>On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Geoff Clare wrote:
>>> The xargs behavior on UNIX System V release 4.0 and on all Solaris
>>> systems has been that a backslash character escapes the next character,
>>> whether or not it is in a quoted string. I don't believe the xargs
>>> utility has ever behaved as documented in the current standard (nor in
>>> earlier versions of POSIX.2 nor in SVID3).
>>
>> The closest to SVR4 I have access to is Unixware 2.1.1, which dates
>> from the mid 1990's. It behaves as per the standard:
>
>Please forgive a newbie question but I am curious why OS' such as Unixware,
>which never achieved more than a fraction of a percent market penetration,
>are of value in determining a standard?
>
>Unixware does/did hold rights to the "Unix" name, but would never be
>considered standard by Joe Average Sysadmin.
Hi Roger,
In this case the issue wasn't whether Unixware was standard, but
rather it was how had systems evolved from a common SVID3 / AT&T UNIX
System base. With several discussions that were held off-list, we have
discovered that a bug fix integrated into Solaris Release 2.7
accidentally introduced a bug in escape processing in quoted strings in
xargs. Carol has asked for the interpretation request to be
withdrawn. The bug in the Solaris xargs utility will be fixed to bring
it back into alignment with the standards.
- Don
>
>Roger Marquis
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