Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-Id: <200312291900.hBTJ0Gqd014331@guild.plethora.net> From: seebs AT plethora DOT net (Peter Seebach) Reply-To: seebs AT plethora DOT net (Peter Seebach) To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Re: Question about ash and getopts In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 29 Dec 2003 11:10:23 MST." Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 13:00:16 -0600 X-IsSubscribed: yes In message , "Blair P. Houghto n" writes: >So I take it this "idiom" is only supposed to work in newer cygwin versions? I dunno. It's a very, very, odd idiom, that leaves you stuck with a great deal of manual parsing anyway. >And I too am puzzled why someone would defeature a shell instead >of letting it work with either method. I don't see it as a >portability issue unless you think a significant number of users >will be porting their scripts from systems running cygwin to systems >running atavistic variants of UNIX. I did check; SunOS 4.1.3 had getopts too. So, basically, it's portable to everything except the 3b1 and 3b2, and possibly old versions of OSF/1. But, most importantly, it's in POSIX. I can see no reason for /bin/sh to not be at least reasonably close to a POSIX shell, when the code is already written. The "it saves space" argument is implausible, and frankly counterproductive; it should be obvious to the casual reader that calls to getopt are MUCH more expensive than a shell with getopts in it, as is the other option, running bash instead. A shell without getopts may be marginally smaller, such that scripts which don't use getopts are "faster"... But did anyone actually measure this making a difference, or is this just Little Tin God optimization at work? -s -- 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/