Subject: bug#10766: bug#11893: Regression in automake 1.12.1 on Mac OS X

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 09:48:31 -0600

On 07/12/2012 08:37 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:

>>> Agreed (albeit it does its dirty work for now).  Any suggestion on
>>> how to make it more reliable?
>>
>> Is test /usr/bin/CC -ef /usr/bin/cc portable enough?
>>
> I have no idea ...  it seems to work on Cygwin 1.5 though.

In general, 'test a -ef b' is not portable - it is not required by POSIX
2008 (although it has been proposed for a future version of POSIX).  But
on Cygwin, /bin/sh happens to support it.  If you can guarantee that you
are already on cygwin before using -ef, then this would work; or maybe
if you pre-filter with 'test . -ef .' to ensure that -ef is understood,
before then trying -ef to check for case insensitivity.

Other than that, the only supported method in existing POSIX for
checking for equal files is by parsing 'ls -i' output; but I don't know
if 'ls -i' is portable to ancient hosts.

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org