On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 10:14:29AM +0000, Smylers wrote: > Michael G Schwern writes: > > > There's nothing about '--' which indicates "pass the rest through to > > the tests". > > It did to me, honestly! As soon as I opened David's e-mail at the start > of this thread the "--" jumped out of the paragraph of text, and I > guessed what his words would say before I read them.
That's because you knew the context already - it's in the subject. Without that context it might not have been so obvious. > > In fact, it normally means "stop processing the following as switches > > and instead treat them as files". > > Or possibly, it means "stop processing the following as switches". > Which is what it does mean in this case. Yes, I've never expected the arguments after -- to necessarily be files. I think that's often the case, especially when the files look like switches, but ... On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 10:01:01PM -0800, Michael G Schwern wrote: > How do other utilities handle this sort of thing? ... I have a bunch of programs here where I use -- for this very purpose, to pass options through to programs that will be called by the program I am calling. The only real problem, as I mentioned before, is that this is a one off. The scheme can't really be extended to pass two sets of options through to two programs, for example. That said, I'm not overly bothered by this. It's not a feature I've felt a need for in many years of writing fairly complicated test suites. In general, I try to keep my command lines simple. If there is something complicated that I will need to run regularly, I will make it a make target, which makes it easy to run and documents it as a bonus. When it is a make target, it doesn't really matter if it is a little more complicated than it might be. -- Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pjcj.net
