Hi,

maybe you can enlighten me :-)

I try to use dash (0.5.8-2.3) on Debian unstable for executing ./configure 
scripts. Since Debian builds with --disable-lineno, all ./configure scripts 
silently fall back to bash (I created bug report #842242 to get this fixed).

Next I rebuilt the package from the (Debian) sources without --disable-lineno 
and installed it. Now I see error messages from dash when it comes to the do 
nothing operator :.

$ dash -c 'test -n "a" && :'
dash: 1: :: not found
$ echo $?
127

$ bash -c 'test -n "a" && :'
$ echo $?
0

Since this : construct is wildly used and I know that dash on other systems 
work with it, I wonder what is wrong here.

Is there a known bug, maybe fixed on recent dash versions ?
Or has this some simple reason my stupidity doesn't see ?

Regards, Tim