== A Unix without a _test_ program

Courtesy of a [[recent entry ../sysadmin/WhyGenericProfile]], I was
reading over my dotfiles when I stumbled over a remnant of a rather
peculiar and annoying Unix (unfortunately, I no longer remember which
one it was).  This Unix was notable for a simple reason: it didn't have
a _test_ program.

You might sensibly ask how on earth anything that can possibly call
itself a Unix would be missing such a basic thing; after all, without
_test_ a lot of scripts don't work at all, since _test_ is also known as
'_[_', which is commonly used in Bourne shell condition checking.  The
answer is simple: the people behind this Unix had made _test_ a [[shell
builtin ../programming/BourneListMatch]], so all of the shell scripts
still worked. They just hadn't set up a _/bin/test_ program, presumably
because they didn't expect any sensible program to run _test_ directly.

(This is slightly less crazy than it seems; if you have a a _test_
program and also a _test_ shell builtin, you have to make sure that the
two behave exactly the same. If you expect the _test_ program to never
be used, removing it simplifies your life and means that you don't have
to keep it in sync with your improvements to the shell builtin.)

As it happens, there is one sort of sensible program that does exactly
this: [[non-standard shells ../sysadmin/NonstandardShellAdvantage]]. My
shell doesn't have _test_ as a builtin, so I needed an actual _test_
program; when this Unix didn't have one, my dotfiles became moderately
unhappy.

(My solution was to make a _test_ Bourne shell script that just ran the
shell's builtin _test_, which is what this particular Unix vendor should
have done for _/bin/test_ in the first place.)