check for numeric content in a shell script (FreeBSD sh)

[Carl Johnson]

parv at pair.com writes:

>>     if expr "$arg" : "[1-9]*\.\{0,1\}[0-9]*$" > /dev/null
>
> That regex considers "." a number but not "0.9" (this one seems to
> be due to typo) nor a negative number.

I had been pointing out an error in the regular expression that
someone else had posted, but I obviously didn't do any better.

> I would personally to use egrep or awk (printf "%s" "${arg}" | egrep
> "${regex}" [0]) instead of expr.

I would probably just perl for the whole thing, especially seeing the
limitations in trying to use expr.  Thanks for pointing out another
approach.

-- 
Carl Johnson		carlj at peak.org