From: Rasmus Villemoes <ravi@prevas.dk>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:01:06 +0000 (+0200)
Subject: cmd: test: add bug-compatibility special case for 'test -n'
X-Git-Tag: v2026.07-rc1~21^2~27
X-Git-Url: http://git.ipfire.org/gitweb/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=f7e7c55e53e8;p=thirdparty%2Fu-boot.git

cmd: test: add bug-compatibility special case for 'test -n'

It turns out that there is lots of code in the wild, including in the
U-Boot tree itself, which used to rely on

  test -n $somevar

to yield false when $somevar is not defined or empty. See for example
all the occurrences of 'test -n $fdtfile'. That was really only a
quirk of the implementation that refused calls with argc < 3, and not
because it was interpreted as

  test -n "$somevar"

which is how this should be spelled.

While not exactly conforming to POSIX, we can accomodate such scripts
by special-casing a single argument "-n" to be interpreted as if it
comes from code as above with empty $somevar.

Since we only just added the ability to test a string for emptiness
using the single-argument form, it is very unlikely that there is code
doing

  test "$str"

which would now fail if $str happens to be exactly "-n"; such a test
should really always be spelled

  test -n "$str"

Fixes: 8b0619579b2 ("cmd: test: fix handling of single-argument form of test")
Reported-by: Franz Schnyder <franz.schnyder@toradex.com>
Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <ravi@prevas.dk>
Reviewed-by: Simon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>
---

diff --git a/cmd/test.c b/cmd/test.c
index 0d0f090386c..c76ebf800ee 100644
--- a/cmd/test.c
+++ b/cmd/test.c
@@ -75,12 +75,25 @@ static int do_test(struct cmd_tbl *cmdtp, int flag, int argc,
 	 * Per POSIX, 'test' with 0 arguments should return 1, while
 	 * 'test <arg>' should be equivalent to 'test -n <arg>',
 	 * i.e. true if and only if <arg> is not empty.
+	 *
+	 * However, due to previous versions of U-Boot unconditionally
+	 * returning false when 'test' was given less than two
+	 * arguments, there are existing scripts that do
+	 *
+	 *   test -n $somevar
+	 *
+	 * (i.e. without properly quoting $somevar) and expecting that
+	 * to return false when $somevar expands to nothing. It is
+	 * quite unlikely that anyone would use the single-argument
+	 * form to test a string for being empty and a possible
+	 * non-empty value for that string to be exactly "-n". So we
+	 * interpret 'test -n' as if it was 'test -n ""'.
 	 */
 	if (argc < 2)
 		return 1;
 
 	if (argc == 2)
-		return !strcmp(argv[1], "");
+		return !strcmp(argv[1], "") || !strcmp(argv[1], "-n");
 
 #ifdef DEBUG
 	{
diff --git a/test/hush/if.c b/test/hush/if.c
index 6129e2c530c..6117c37e53c 100644
--- a/test/hush/if.c
+++ b/test/hush/if.c
@@ -41,6 +41,10 @@ static int hush_test_if_base(struct unit_test_state *uts)
 	sprintf(if_formatted, if_format, "test 'abc'");
 	ut_assertok(run_command(if_formatted, 0));
 
+	/* Special case: 'test -n' interpreted as 'test -n ""'. */
+	sprintf(if_formatted, if_format, "test '-n'");
+	ut_asserteq(1, run_command(if_formatted, 0));
+
 	return 0;
 }
 HUSH_TEST(hush_test_if_base, 0);
@@ -385,6 +389,10 @@ static int hush_test_lbracket_alias(struct unit_test_state *uts)
 	ut_asserteq(1, run_command(if_formatted, 0));
 	ut_assert_nextline(missing_rbracket_error);
 
+	/* Special case: '[ -n ]' interpreted as '[ -n "" ]'. */
+	sprintf(if_formatted, if_format, "[ -n ]");
+	ut_asserteq(1, run_command(if_formatted, 0));
+
 	return 0;
 }
 HUSH_TEST(hush_test_lbracket_alias, UTF_CONSOLE);