Re: realpath options

[Bruno Haible]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> To me realpath is conceptually (cd; pwd), so I used
> the -L and -P options as defined by POSIX for cd.

Makes good sense, yes.

> I considered using --no-dereference, but while the symlinks
> in a path are not expanded, they are dereferenced unless -m is specified.

Indeed, good point.

How about '--no-symlinks'?

> --strip was used to be compatible with the util already in Debian.

In that case, I would add both '--no-symlinks' and '--strip' as
synonyms, and mark the latter as deprecated about one year after
Debian has dropped its own, earlier 'realpath' program.

You are the "upstream" compared to Debian. Moving things upstream
requires some cleanups sometimes. If such cleanups don't happen,
the ill-chosen names of the first implementation stuck forever.
For example, in the *at() functions API, which was copied from
Solaris to glibc and from glibc to POSIX, we now have functions
called 'fchownat' and 'unlinkat'. An inconsistent naming: the 'f'
prefix has no meaning. It only confuses people for historical reasons.

Bruno