My question bases on the discussion in: https://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2012-November/027946.html where an empty variable $OPTS was passed quoted: $ rsync "$OPTS" -avx from to
How should a program react for Zero-length arguments? Today, coreutils programs give a diagnostic like this: $ cat '' cat: : No such file or directory $ ls -l '' ls: cannot access : No such file or directory I mean, if the argument refers to a file or directory, then it's impossible for it to be an empty string. Exceptions are du and wc: $ du '' du: invalid zero-length file name $ wc '' wc: invalid zero-length file name and 'sort --files0': $ sort --files0-from=/tmp/x sort: /tmp/x:1: invalid zero-length file name Is this behavior correct / specified somewhere? At least it should be consistent among coreutils, eh? Have a nice day, Berny
