Re: posix command search and execution

[Greg Wooledge]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2023 at 09:14:41AM +0100, Mike Jonkmans wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 08:07:31PM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote:
> > On 11/9/23 11:17 AM, Mike Jonkmans wrote:
> > > On Thu, Nov 09, 2023 at 10:12:06PM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Ubuntu 22.04 `getconf path' returns /bin:/usr/bin
> > > and these are symlinked.
> > Then that's an issue to take up with Debian/Ubuntu, right? If they're
> > symlinked by the distro, then getconf PATH should only return one of them.
> 
> Yes, that would be more efficient than a shell checking for symlinks in PATH.
> 
> I'll try to convince them.

Good luck with that.  The problem with "usrmerge" in Debian is that
it's still optional.  There are Debian infrastructure systems (virtual
machines especially) that don't use it.  Therefore, simply changing
the static answer in confstr(3) across all Debian systems would be
incorrect.  They would need to make it check the actual /bin to see
whether it's a symbolic link to usr/bin, and give an answer accordingly.

It's a lot less work to just leave it as is.