Date: Wed, 6 May 2020 08:18:17 +0000
From: Austin Group Bug Tracker <nore...@msnkbrown.net>
Message-ID: <8de7a2b24ecdb11ff3e05b4279ae5...@austingroupbugs.net>
| (I didn't compare the rest of
| your new PATH description with the current one to see what else you changed
Almost all the words I used were simple cut & paste from what is there
now - the existing text is actually all correct (modulo the missing
resolve a path containing a slash but not beginning with one bit).
It is just hard to read to know that it is all correct... Moving
the text around and adding just a few words helps, I think.
| - it would be helpful if you could propose the changes you want in smaller
| chunks so there is less unchanged text to compare.)
I can do that, and will do ... but I am not sure in which form to
do that. What I see normally is stuff like
"at line NNN change xxx to yyy"
or
"at line NNN after xxx add yyy"
or similar.
I can do it that way, but then it won't be obvious (without
doing a manual compare) that the text is actually not changing,
just being rearranged.
I could instead do
"move the sentence at line NNN beginning (or containing,
or "that is") xxx to after yyy on line MMM"
which makes it easier to see that the text is not changing, just
being moved around - but much harder to visualise what the changes
and end result will be (without actually doing it).
| The problems with fc -e and xargs could either be addressed here or in a
| separate bug.
If it helps the NetBSD man page for sh, in the section on fc, says of -e
-e editor
Use the editor named by editor to edit the commands. The
editor string is a command name, subject to search via the
PATH variable.
(Then it goes on to what happens if -e is omitted, which I am not sure
really belongs in the description of the -e option, but that's not
material here).
[Aside; in this e-mail I cannot (easily) reproduce the font/colour
changes that occur (where possible) in the man page, but the first
use of "editor" (in the paragraph) is just a word, the 2nd refers to
the arg of the "-e" option, as does the 3rd (more generically).]
For xargs we're no better than the standard it appears, the sole
reference to PATH searches (such as it is) in its man page is
SEE ALSO
.... execvp(3) ...
That is the sole reference to execvp in the man page, or for that
matter, to any of the exec*() family of functions, the string "exec"
otherwise occurs only as part of the word "executed".
Someone industrious enough could deduce from its presence, for no
apparent reason, that that reference implies that execvp() is used
to run the utility, and go check its man page, where info on PATH
searching can be found.
I do not recommend copying this method for POSIX!
kre
