[2125] in SIPB bug reports
where
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ckclark@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Wed Oct 2 16:12:02 1991
From: ckclark@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 91 16:11:07 -0400
To: marc@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: ckclark@mit.edu
> Is there a reason to keep the where program in the sipb locker?
Consider for a minute the possibility that you are running a shell which
does not have a built-in ``which'' command.
Let's look at the state of the utilities available to determine where
programs are:
/usr/ucb/which is only useful for users of a version of csh which does
*not* support the built-in. I know of only one such version of csh
available on Athena: the vendor csh for the RS/6000.
As for the /usr/ucb/whereis command, it ignores the PATH environment
variable completely, opting instead to search a list of hard-coded
directories, including such frequently used locations as the following:
/src/ucb/pascal/utilities
/usr/hosts
...
(For a good time, run strings on /usr/ucb/whereis.)
The SIPB where program is also potentially useful in scripts, where the
which csh builtin has problems. For example, the following script:
#!/bin/csh -f
set bar = `/mit/sipb/vaxbin/where bindtest`
echo "bar is " $bar
produces the expected output:
bar is /mit/watchmaker/vaxbin/bindtest
But if I use `which' instead of /mit/sipb/vaxbin/where, I get:
ioctl: Operation not supported on socket
bar is /mit/watchmaker/vaxbin/bindtest
Also, if the program is kept, I think one of the e-mail addresses listed
under AUTHORS, although still working, is archaic. :-)
-Calvin
