Subject: Re: /etc/profile - futile try to predict order of execution (Please inform maintainer of 00xfree.sh)
From: Christopher Faylor <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:01:35 -0400

On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 05:23:40PM -0400, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 04:59:07PM -0400, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>> >Speaking of your machine, could this be because you're using Win98?
>> >(Checking) Bingo!  Somehow, on Win98 find traverses files in unsorted
>> >order, i.e., the order they were created.
>>
>> Which is acceptable behavior, as I'm sure you know.  You can't rely on
>> any kind of predictable ordering behavior from find, AFAIK.
>
>Yes, it's acceptable, but I guess I'm not the only one spoiled by Win2k
>(judging by the contents of /etc/profile).

When I was debugging the never-ending "find misses the last directory"
problem, I was actually surprised to see that everything was returned in
alphabetic order.  It is nice to see predictable behavior in
opendir/readdir.  Too bad it isn't part of SUSv3.

>The reason I even tried to raise this point was that some scripts
>apparently did rely on this behavior, and I was asking whether, perhaps,
>/etc/profile should call these scripts in alphabetical order to satisfy
>these expectations.

Yes, I understand why you made the point and I agree 100%.  I was just
trying to forestall any "Cygwin should fix this" type of reasoning.

cgf

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