Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 13:32:46 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: "Mark E." cc: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: shell utils 1.16 question In-Reply-To: <199901081812.SAA42118@out2.ibm.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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.