Mailing-List:	contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe:	<mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive:	<http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post:	<mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help:	<mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sourceware.org/ml/#faqs>
Sender:	cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To:	mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject:	`touch' created wrong file without giving error
Organization:	Private
From:	pjacklam AT online DOT no (Peter J. Acklam)
User-Agent:	Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3
Date:	04 Jun 2004 08:41:37 +0200
Message-ID:	<vfi74yfy.fsf@online.no>
Lines:	27
MIME-Version:	1.0
X-IsSubscribed:	yes

I tried creating a file named " foo ", i.e., with two leading and
two trailing blanks using "touch".  It turned out that "touch"
created the file, but without the two trailing blanks.  It might
be that a file name with trailing blanks can't be created on an
NTFS file system, but "touch" shouldn't create the wrong file but
rather give an error telling that it failed.  Silently creating
the wrong name is generally bad:

   $ touch '  foo  '
   $ echo $?
   0
   $ for file in *foo*; do echo "|$file|"; done
   |  foo|
        ^^

"touch" returned exit status 0, but failed to create the file.
"ls" also shows that the file only has the leading blanks:

   $ ls -b *foo*
   \ \ foo

Should "touch" return an error when it fails?

Peter

-- 
Peter J. Acklam - pjacklam AT online DOT no - http://home.online.no/~pjacklam



--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/

- Raw text -