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 <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> 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....)