I tried to start Magnolia on Ubuntu 10.10 and I got the following error:

[: 15: -a: unexpected operator

I got the following response from someone on the mailing list:

Seems that it is a shell issue with setenv.sh, not actually magnolia_control.sh. When you run magnolia_control.sh it actually invokes startup.sh which in turn invokes setenv.sh.

If you look inside setenv.sh, there is the following:

if [ -a "${CURDIR}/magnolia_banner.txt" ] ; then
cat ${CURDIR}/magnolia_banner.txt
fi

As far as I'm aware the "-a" option is not a valid file test parameter in Dash, which is the shell invoked by /bin/sh in Ubuntu 10.10. You get the same problem if you explicitly invoke the startup script with another shell such as Bash, which doesn't have the -a option either.

I don't think it is causing any problems, as it is only trying to display the Magnolia Banner text.