On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Stephen Borrill wrote:

> I see from the 1.11 commit this is to recognise octal and hex, but must a
> leading zero always indicate octal?

Yes; that's standard practice in Unix (and the C programming language).  It
is also required by the Open Group shell specification:

    http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_06_04

[...]
Only the decimal-constant, octal-constant, and hexadecimal-constant
constants specified in the ISO C standard, Section 6.4.4.1 are required to
be recognized as constants.
[...]

"octal-constant" is specified as an all-digits number prefixed by "0".
("hexadecimal-constant" is specified as a hexadecimal number prefixed by
"0x" or "0X".)

So actually, NetBSD 1.6.x's shell is the broken one.  8-)

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>