Re: AW: dirname - bug or feature?

[Eric Blake]

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According to Fill Manuel on 2/25/2007 11:49 PM:
> Hi again,
> 
> First of all, thanks for the answer. I didn't know that there was a
> program like readlink. ;)
> 
> But: What's the deal with the -m option? The manpage of my readlink here
> ( SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 ) shows:
> readlink (coreutils) 5.2.1

No wonder.  That is several years old, with known bugs and deficiencies.
You should update (the latest stable version is 6.7, and you can also try
6.8).

> me. But I'm curious. Could you tell me what -m does?

  -m, --canonicalize-missing    canonicalize by following every symlink in
                                every component of the given name recursively,
                                without requirements on components existence

> The last example with the "find" was just to show you that dirname can't
> handle stdin and that it would be nice if it could ( i now know that
> readlink in a loop also does that job, but I didn't know that ). That
> wasn't a practical problem. Just example ;) ( needless to say .. a
> stupid one ;P ).

And as you were told earlier, this was discussed in a thread a couple of
weeks earlier.  Until someone is bothered enough to write a patch, this
won't happen; particularly since it is possible to emulate dirname with
sed or even XSI shell capabilities if you want stdin filtering.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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