Re: Should -et be available?

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 03:35:57PM +0200, Quentin L'Hours wrote:
> On 25/05/2020 15:11, Peng Yu wrote:
> > But if your point is that -et should not be added. Then, why having
> > -eq (as -le -ge implies -eq)?
> > 
> > Therefore, I think -eq should be added to bash to make it complete in
> > timestamp test.
> 
> It's probably because -eq is useful in many scenarios.
> But on the other hand testing that two files have the exact same timestamp
> seems very specific, whereas checking for instance if a file is outdated
> compared to another one is very common.
> 
> Things that are only useful in very specific situations and that can be
> achieved with simple workarounds (-e + -ot + -nt here) have very little
> chance to be added (even if it seems trivial) for the usual reasons:
> development time, maintenance, increased complexity etc.

I can't for the life of me think of an actual real world use case for
-et, honestly.  There's the non-standard -ef which *does* have some use,
albeit uncommon ones (like testing whether a symblic link points to a
particular regular file, or if two symbolic links point to the same
file, etc.)


-- 
Andreas (Kusalananda) Kähäri
SciLifeLab, NBIS, ICM
Uppsala University, Sweden

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