I believe IBMis usually quite commited to being inline with published and accepted standards. However, this is a standard with 2008 in it's name, and AIX 5.3 is from 2004, and the TL/SP level I am compiling on, for backwards compatibility is dated 2007 - so hard to complain that it is not up to a 2008 standard - although I expect the program you sent will compile and execute. It is the installp installer that has issues because it uses the [] characters for special purposes. Maybe I can find a way/modification to the mkinstallp program so that installp will accept the input. And yes, deleting/not including it is probably the simplest solution. On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 5:09 PM, Paul Eggert wrote: > Michael Felt wrote: > >> But to have a name like that, I must be too old fashioned - >> where is the win? >> > > It's so that execlp ("FOO") acts like the shell command FOO, or, more > precisely, so that the attached C program works like '[ -d / ]' at the > shell level. POSIX requires that all standard utilities (except for a very > short list) must work the same way from a C program as from the shell. See > the last sentence of: > > http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ > utilities/V3_chap01.html#tag_17_06 > > '[' is not on the list of exceptions, so coreutils arranges for it to be > an executable, as POSIX requires. > > > AIX does not >> permit files in an installp package are refused when they include certain >> special characters >> > > It may be simpler to just omit '[' from your installp package (I assume > that's some downstream thing). I doubt whether anybody but POSIX nerds > will care. AIX itself doesn't seem to be POSIX-conforming here, as the > attached C program fails on AIX. (If *you* are a POSIX nerd please feel > free to file a bug report with IBM....) >