On Wed, 6 Apr 2016 23:33:02 +0200 Mattias Andrée <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Apr 2016 16:58:12 -0400 > Michael Stone <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Wed, Apr 06, 2016 at 10:36:50PM +0200, Mattias Andrée > > wrote: > > >On Wed, 6 Apr 2016 16:23:23 -0400 Michael Stone > > ><[email protected]> wrote: > > >> Just wondering, what's the use case? > > > > > >I just don't want a separate tool for it, > > > > Well, that's not a particularly compelling use case, > > especially since testing the output of ls -A seems > > pretty straightforward. > > But what is likely is that people write sometime like > > test -d "$1" && test $(ls -1 "$1" | wc -l) = 0 > > Most people are of course going to miss to use --, > but that is always the case and it is just an unimportant > bonus that that does not matter with test. > > Then we also have the problem that people will not > consider that file may be a symlink ("$1/" is required.) > > People will also forget hidden files. > > But yes, you do not need it, just like you do not need > head, echo, cut --complement, basename, dirname, pwd, > seq, printenv that does not fail with exit value 2 > (well, you do need that one if you want to be portable,) > suffixes and multiple arguments in sleep, touch, true, > false, yes, link, unlink, rm -d, test -bcdefghLnpSstuz, Missed test -k. Sorry, I had to add this, it was disturbing my sleep. > test -ne, test -ge, test -le, test -lt, test -ef, > test !=, [. They can all be trivially implemented using > other tools, with with a subset of the tool, with only > marginal performance impact. but they are still nice to > have. > > > > > Mike Stone > > > > >
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