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Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1999/01/10/06:34:08

Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 13:32:46 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender: eliz AT is
To: "Mark E." <snowball3 AT usa DOT net>
cc: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: shell utils 1.16 question
In-Reply-To: <199901081812.SAA42118@out2.ibm.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.990110133223.20678R-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, Mark E. wrote:

> Seeing that the latest official DJGPP version of shell utilities is 1.12 
> and the latest version is 1.16, I thought I'd give porting 1.16 a try using 
> the patches in 1.12 as a start and make the port available.

A good idea.  Please go ahead.

> One thing I 
> want to do is make "test -f" find executables like "test -x" does since 
> autoconf and the configure scripts like to use "test -f".

Let's keep things in perspective here, shall we?  "test -f" is not
used in configure scripts alone.  Somebody might actually want to use
it to look for files.  If and when they do, I'm not sure they would
like "test -f foo" mysteriously succeed when there's no file `foo'
anywhere in sight, but there is `foo.bat', say.

Moreover, what you suggest would leave a user no easy escape from this
situation, even if they somehow understand why is this happening,
unless you now introduce a new option "test -f --no-x", which disables
this ``feature''.

Besides, in most cases this change won't help you a bit with configure
scripts, since `test' is built into Bash, and so Bash itself will
never use the external version.

It is also my firm belief that this problem should not be solved on
the level of `test'.  `test' is too low-level to solve such
context-dependent problems.  You risk getting users into more trouble
than you solve.

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