RE: Problem in configure

[James Shewey <jdshewey@gmail.com>]

Ahh. That makes sense. Interesting bit of history there. The x in the left side of the evuation is what threw me. I didn't think that would even be legal syntactically, but those explanations make a lot of sense.

- James

-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Franke <Christian.Franke@t-online.de>
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 3:38 AM
To: The development of GRUB 2 <grub-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Problem in configure

Clemens Helfmeier wrote:
> This is a shell thing. It just ensures that the evaluation does not
> result in if test = xno; then
> (in case the variable is empty) and thus throw an error. with "x" it
> its like this for an empty variable
> if test x = xno; then
> which would work fine for shells.
> 

BTW: This is not necessary if the expanded argument is quoted like in
the original example.

Instead of
  test "x$foo" = "xno"
it is OK to use:
  test "$foo" = "no"
or
  test "$foo" = no
which is IMO more easy to read. For an unset/empty variable, this
expands to
  test "" = no
which does not throw an error.

The leading 'x' was probably necessary for very ancient shells with
broken evaluation of quoted empty argument.



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