Re: pwd doesn't support -L or -P

[Eric Blake]

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According to Reuben Thomas on 10/22/2008 6:08 AM:
> These two switches are necessary for POSIX compatibility. I note that
> bash's pwd does support them; is the intention that bash's built-in pwd,
> which does, should fill this gap in a GNU system?

It simply means that no one has ever written the patch to supply them.
Would you care to try?

I tried, several years ago (the mailing list archives documents my initial
attempt), but I abandoned the effort at that time when I realized that we
couldn't necessarily rely on $PWD to be accurate, and that the gnulib path
canonicalization routines didn't have a handy way to remove ./ and ../
elements from a bogus $PWD.

But yes, you generally use the shell's builtin pwd anyway, so it's nice
that bash already supplies these options.  As for the fact that POSIX
requires pwd to default to -L, but coreutils defaults to -P, I'm not sure
whether we would be breaking the large number of scripts that have come to
rely on /bin/pwd supplying -P semantics.

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

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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