On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 03:40:36PM +0000, Pádraig Brady wrote: > On 12/15/2012 03:09 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote: [...] > >And finally: -n is pretty much useless now with multiple arguments, > >because the output is just concatenated together: > > > > $ src/readlink --no /user /user > > homehome > > >Wouldn't it be better to allow -n only for single-argument calls, > >or use a blank " " as delimiter between the output for multiple > >args, or warn? > > Since -n is a largely redundant option anyway, > I was just keeping it around for compat reasons. > BSD operates like above, so why diverge?
If BSD readlink -n does something totally useless, it's not a reason to follow and introduce that useless behaviour in GNU readlink. I've tried to construct an example where readlink -n with multiple arguments could be used harmlessly, and the only case I have so far is when readlink's output does not matter (e.g. grep -q ^.) or discarded completely. So, please do not add multiple arguments support to readlink -n unless you can also add a usage example for that feature. -- ldv
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