From: Junio C Hamano Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 10:33:02 GMT Subject: Re: recent patch breaks the build ? Message-ID: <7voe4jy36p.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> In-Reply-To: <20051117021014.GC3968@reactrix.com> Nick Hengeveld writes: > Assuming --vernum does work, is there a reasonable/portable way to > compare two hex values like 070801? I would assume that it is always 6 lowercase hexdigits %06x when supported, or showing nothing to stdout for ancient ones. A horrible but probably portable way would be: case `(echo 070801; curl-config --vernum) 2>/dev/null | sort -r | sed -ne 2p` in 070801) echo Happy ;; *) echo Sad ;; esac The obvious one is unfortunately not very portable: if test 070801 \< `curl-config --vernum` then echo "Happy" else echo "Sad" fi This would work if your test is bash/dash-builtin. The following do not seem to know about '<' '>' string comparison: GNU /usr/bin/test from coreutils (version 5.2.1) OpenBSD shell builtin Solaris /usr/bin/test