Re: weird problem -- path interpretted/eval'd as numeric expression

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 03/29/2013 12:57 PM, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:41:46AM -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
>>      include was designed to search the path for functions that
>> are relative paths.  While the normal sourcepath allows searching for
>> filenames on the search path, I don't believe (please correct if I am wrong
>> and this works now, as it would make life much simpler) that the PATH will
>> be searched if you give it something like:
>>
>> source lib/Util/sourcefile.shh
> 
> Is that all you want?  Here:
> 
> include() {
>     local paths dir
>     IFS=: read -ra paths <<< "$PATH"
>     for dir in "${paths[@]}"; do
>       if [[ -r $dir/$1 ]]; then
>           source "$dir/$1"
>           return
>       fi
>     done
>     echo "could not find '$1' in PATH" >&2
>     return 1
> }
> 
AFAIK, this won't work if the sourced file contains declarations
like 'declare -a foo=(1 2)'; those variables will be made local to
the 'include' function.  Perhaps an alias could work better (but
writing it might involve some unpleasant tricks with eval etc.)

Regards,
  Stefano