From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050513 Fedora/1.0.4-1.3.1 Firefox/1.0.4 Description of problem: The man page for ksh says that + command line options are supported by the builtin getopts: getopts [ -a name ] optstring vname [ arg ... ] ... parameters are used. An option argument begins with a + or a -. An option not beginning with + or - or the argument -- ends the options. ... The option letter will be prepended with a + when arg begins with a +. However + options on the command line are not being recognized as options. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): ksh-20050202-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. write a simple ksh script with a getopts option loop 2. run it with a + command line option 3. Actual Results: The + option is not recognized as an option but is treated as an ordinary argument. Expected Results: The + option should have been recognized as an option and prepended with a + as the man page describes. Additional info: This simple script shows the problem: while getopts :n opt do case $opt in n) print "-n selected";; +n) print "+n selected";; esac done shift $(($OPTIND-1)) print "arguments: $*" When run with pdksh or other ksh implementations with a +n option it produces the output "+n selected" as expected. When run with the ksh shipped with FC4 (ksh-93) it produces "arguments: +n" from the final print statement. The POSIX standard doesn't allow + arguments (it seems) but removing it from ksh breaks backward compatibility and cross-platform compatibility since it's supported in pdksh and commercial ksh implementations.
ksh's man page doesn't cover everything, please use getopts own man page: ksh> getopts --?? You'll find this section: If the leading character of optstring is +, then arguments beginning with + will also be considered options. A leading : character or a : following a leading + in optstring affects the way errors are handled. If you rewrite your testcase as while getopts +:n opt do case $opt in n) print "-n selected";; +n) print "+n selected";; esac done shift $(($OPTIND-1)) print "arguments: $*" everything works as expected.
Thanks for the quick solution. That works and is portable (although not mentioned in the man pages for pdksh and other ksh implementations). However it still breaks backward and cross-platform compatibility since the syntax without the leading + works with other ksh implementations (including pdksh).