Oleg Verych <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> == Proposition A. Do not implement `-a' and `-o'. ==
I sympathise with your view Oleg. Indeed, if you raised this
a few years back I'd have removed it with no hesitation :)
Unfortunately these days there are too many systems that already
use dash out there (mostly Debian + Ubuntu) that have loads of
scripts on them that use -a or -o.
There's no way that we can get away with just breaking these
scripts.
> == Proposition B. Extend `-ot' and `-nt' to check a list of files. ==
>
> This are not POSIX ops, described in [0] as to be not included from
> original KornShell, due to not including `[[' semantics.
>
> Nonetheless, they are present in `dash` and in other implementations.
> Maybe because of [0]:
>
> Additional implementation-defined operators and primary_operators
> may be provided by implementations. They shall be of the form -
> operator where the first character of operator is not a digit.
>
> Now, i want to add something like this:
>
> #!/bin/dash
> cd /mnt/path/to/src
>
> test file.c -ot [ utils/foo.c include/bar.h ] && do_update
> [ file.c -nt [ utils/foo.c include/bar.h ] ] || do_nothing
>
> test vmlinux.o -nt [ $DEP_LIST ] || do_something
It looks neat but I'm not convinced that we need this feature.
I have two reasons for this:
1) This can just as easily be done in a script:
{ [ file.c -ot utils/foo.c ] || [ file.c -ot include/bar.h ]; } &&
do_update
{ [ file.c -nt utils/foo.c ] && [ file.c -nt include/bar.h ]; } ||
do_nothing
for i in $DEP_LIST; do
[ vmlinux.o -nt "$i" ] || ! break
done || do_something
You can probably write a shell function that implemented this
in the syntax you want.
2) POSIX does not require this.
In other words, I would consider a new feature for dash if it
is either required by POSIX or if it's useful enough and that
it can't easily be done using existing shell primitives.
Thanks,
--
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