Michael Harding wrote: > state or equivalent test is needed for your situation. Note that state > even returns a different return code (36) for an empty filemode as opposed > to the 28 for file not found, and maybe that's why DISK's behavior differs.
STATE can suppress the messages for both conditions, though, which is why I was surprised that PIPE DISK didn't. In the case at hand, I know the filemode is a single letter, but in other situations I often want to ignore even invalid characters in the fileid. I guess in the general case it's probably best to STATE the fileid beforehand anyway, to avoid collisions with pipeline characters. ¬R
