Subject: bug#29266: gzip-1.8.41 test results: help-version on HP-UX

From: Jim Meyering <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2017 13:42:15 -0800

On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 9:40 AM, Bruno Haible <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Hi Jim,
>
>> On hppa, the test that runs `gunzip --help > /dev/full` fails
>> unexpectedly. It should run only on a system with writable "char"
>> device /dev/full, and it should fail like this:
>>
>> $ gunzip --help > /dev/full
>> echo: write error: No space left on device
>> [Exit 1]
>>
>> But on your system, it exits with status 2.
>
> Yes:
>
> $ ./gunzip --help > /dev/full
> echo: No space left on device
> $ echo $?
> 2

Ohh...
So it's the HP-UX shell's "echo" that is detecting the write failure
but setting errno to 2 rather than the 1 that gzip users would expect
from gunzip.

I'm considering testing only zero-vs-nonzero exit status in the
help-version tests of those wrappers on systems for which echo fails
that way. Otherwise, with all of gzip's wrappers depending on other
programs that do not fail with the gzip-package-expected status, we'd
see too many reports of these unrelated failures.