Re: autoconf 2.49c fails if '.' is in PATH

[Akim Demaille]

Alexandre Oliva <address@hidden> writes:

> On Feb  3, 2001, Akim Demaille <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > The question is `is $FILE an executable in the common sense'.
> 
> I think the best thing to do is to just ignore the issue of whether
> the found executable is a directory while testing -x or -f, and test
> for -d later on, notifying the user and possibly aborting.  This
> second test might have false positives on Cygwin if x/ and x.exe
> exist, but I really don't care.  I'd rather warn the user that
> something bad is about to happen.
> 
> As a data point to support this choice, directories aren't generally
> skipped when searching the PATH.  So why should we?

What do you mean?

/tmp % mkdir executable                                          nostromo 17:43
/tmp % PATH=/tmp which executable                                nostromo 17:43
executable not found
/tmp % which -a which                                            nostromo Err 1
which: shell built-in command
/usr/bin/which
/tmp % PATH=/tmp /usr/bin/which executable                       nostromo 17:44
/tmp/executable

Arg...  Is this really good?  Are there any other PATH walking
programs behaving like this?