Re: posix command search and execution

[Chet Ramey]

On 11/7/23 5:37 PM, Mike Jonkmans wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 07, 2023 at 11:49:25AM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote:
> > On 11/7/23 8:54 AM, Mike Jonkmans wrote:
>
> ...
>
> > > > Look at https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=854 for a discussion
> > > > of this issue.
> > > Thanks for the link, I find that very hard to read though.
> > It's also incomplete; there was a lot of discussion on the mailing list.
> > I don't have a link to a usable public mailing list archive.
>
> So the discussion is hidden. Hmm.

Not hidden; if you look at the open group's mailing list archives, you
can find the messages. I just don't consider the interface usable. It's
barely searchable.

> > > Then again, is there a requirement for the standard utilities to be
> > > found in the current PATH? Or do they just need to be present somewhere.
> > They have to be findable using the value returned by `getconf PATH'. If
> > the user modifies PATH to, say, prepend directories before that standard
> > PATH, then all bets are off.
>
> I see. Weirdly on Ubuntu 22.04, with /bin symlinked to /usr/bin,
> `getconf PATH' produces `/bin:/usr/bin'.
> That looks like a recipe for redundant `stats'.

Does that matter? The value getconf returns is static, and is guaranteed
to find all the standard utilities regardless of what the file system
looks like.

> > (But wait! The list of intrinsics in the latest draft includes type and
> > ulimit, and isn't XSI-shaded. So that will change.)
>
> Isn't that described in `Note 0004803' in
> https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=854
> (not possible to add shade to type and ulimit in column order)

Yes, good catch.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/