On Tuesday 16 September 2014 20:53, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote: > On 2014-09-05 12:26, Ralf Friedl wrote: > > Xabier Oneca -- xOneca wrote: > >> Hello again, > >> > >> 2014-09-05 18:19 GMT+02:00 Xabier Oneca -- xOneca <[email protected]>: > >>> Hello list, > >>> > >>> I want to highlight what GNU coreutils' help docs (info coreutils > >>> 'false invocation') says about false when invoked with --help: > >>> > >>>> Note that `false' (unlike all other programs documented herein) > >>> exits unsuccessfully, even when invoked with `--help' or `--version'. > >>> > >>> I think Busybox should do the same with the applet. > >> And I want to add that --help will only be used ever in an interactive > >> shell by a person, so the return value may be dispensable. (i.e. > >> doesn't mind to the user how does --help return as soon as the help > >> text is printed in screen) > > Actually this is the argument to leave it as it is, because nobody cares > > about > > the return value of "false --help". > > I care about the value of "false --help". Well, actually, let me rephrase: > I care that I can force a failure by swapping in "false" in somewhere where > a user-supplied command is called, without having to do extra work to > to sanitise the arguments sent to the callback. Being able to force failures > is an important part of being able to debug problems. > > I've seen plenty of situations where "--help" can make its way into a command > that wasn't just written by a user in a shell; either intentionally or > unintentionally. Maybe I don't care about what happens when I explicitly, > literally type "false --help" into a shell, and maybe I'm never going > to write "if false --help; then ...; fi" in a script; but even if I don't > care about those, I certainly care what happens when I call "$CMD "$@"" > and $CMD just happens to be "false" or "$@" just happens to include "--help". > I assign "false" to variables like "$CMD" quite frequently. > Isn't that exactly the sort of thing that "false" is for? > > There's also the issue of "busybox false --help" and "busybox sh -c 'false > --help'" > being incompatible with each other. That's awfully confusing--demonstrated by > the exchange between Harald, Bastian, and myself demonstrates. Maybe it's > possible > to argue that "busybox sh -c 'false --help'" should be changed to also return > EXIT_SUCCESS; but it seems much more natural to me to argue in the other > direction ;)
Fixed in git. Thanks. _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
