bash-4.0 regression: negative return values

[Mike Frysinger]

previous versions of bash would happily accept negative values ( treated as a 
signed integer and masked with like 0xff), but it seems some changes related 
to option parsing has broken that

$ f(){ return -1; }; f
-bash: return: -1: invalid option
return: usage: return [n]

POSIX states that the return value is an "unsigned decimal integer":
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_24_01

but bash does not say that in the bash(1) man page ...
-mike

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