I don’t get this point either. If local is not in the POSIX spec, I guess you can’t use it if you want to be POSIX compatible. Just because many shells do it doesn’t mean it’s POSIX.

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gaigalas 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You can target POSIX if you want to, but doing that doesn't guarantee shell scripts will work.

The blog post stresses this, the difference between POSIX and portability.

If you want portability, testing is better for now. One of the goals of these projects is to more precisely capture a retrospec (what actually works, not what was specified), it's the same thing they did with HTML5.

	▲	echoangle an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> but doing that doesn't guarantee shell scripts will work. How so? Can you give an example that should work according to the POSIX spec but doesn’t in a POSIX compliant shell? The example in the post is just some behavior the POSIX spec doesn’t specify, so obviously you wouldn’t be allowed to do that when targeting POSIX.