Hello,

jwinstea@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jim Winstead Jr.) writes

| expr should not be a shell builtin, if you subscribe to the 'rc'
| philosophy of keeping things out of the shell that are just as well
| suited to stand-alone programs, which I believe expr is.

Actually not so :-)  a number of shell functions, including
test, expr, echo, catf, line, . . . are available as builtins
in ash.  One may, however, choose to compile them out.  Including
them as builtins may lead to some funny behavior (expr is not
exactly 100% standard), but make scripts run *much* faster.

Cheers,

David.

--
David Fenyes                                 dfenyes@thesis1.med.uth.tmc.edu
University of Texas Medical School           Houston, Texas