RE: [Dvipng] small fix to configure.ac

[Moraes, Mark]

configure is a Bourne-shell script, so the tcsh 'which' builtin
isn't relevant to it.  Instead sh will search PATH for an
executable.  On Linux and Solaris, that'll most
likely be /usr/bin/which;  on Linux, that's an executable
compiled from a C program, works just fine.
But on Solaris 8 and 10, (and as far as I remember,
on all 4.* BSD derived systems, SunOS3,4 as well)
it's a executable csh script that starts with #!/usr/bin/csh -f
and then pretends to be interactive by setting $prompt
and then sourcing the user's .cshrc;  given that many
csh users use if ( $?prompt ) to protect interactive initialization
(echo, evals, terminal settings etc), this csh script
is somewhat unpredictable, to put it mildly...

"type" has been a Bourne-shell builtin for long enough that
it's significantly more portable/reliable. (Wasn't in v7 or
4BSD, but pretty much every other Un*x)

I'd guess that since Linux or bash users won't see this,
it'd have to be a Solaris *csh user with a non-trivial
.cshrc who'd run into this problem :-)

        Mark.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jan-Åke Larsson [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2006 4:53 PM
To: Moraes, Mark; address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Dvipng] small fix to configure.ac

Moraes, Mark skrev:
> On Solaris and lots of other Unix variants, 'which' is a csh script that
> takes a long time to run, and at least on my Solaris, produces output
> that fails to work with cp (I'm still a bit puzzled why).  Anyway, using
> the sh builtin 'type' is much faster and works well.  (Solaris 8 sh
> doesn't support 'type -p', alas)

Sure? On Solaris 9 and 10, 'which' is a tcsh built-in. No other reports
have ever mentioned this.

/JÅ