[2137] in SIPB bug reports
Re: where
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Horowitz)
Thu Oct 3 20:21:56 1991
To: Ken Raeburn <Raeburn@MIT.EDU>
Cc: ckclark@MIT.EDU, bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 03 Oct 91 15:35:51 -0400.
Reply-To: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 91 20:21:12 EDT
From: Marc Horowitz <marc@Athena.MIT.EDU>
>> You are not expecting people to want "where" when the RS6000s are in
>> more common use? Or are you expecting Athena to replace /bin/csh?
/bin/csh on the rs/6000 has which. I don't know if it gives the ioctl
error or not. Given the number of changes in the shell on the
rs/6000, learning to use which instead of where shouldn't be a big
deal.
>> You haven't addressed the points of use in a shell script, or
>> requiring different commands on different architectures. Do you
>> consider these irrelevant?
the where builtin and the where program do different things, anyway.
So if you really want the same behavior, you'll need different
commands, anyway. Otherwise, having different commands might be
considered a feature, to avoid confusing the users.
>> The only other reasonable course I see is to wait until Athena
>> replaces /bin/csh on the BSD platforms with tcsh-6, then tell people
>> to always use "which", and not care if they get ioctl messages from
>> uses in sh scripts.
tcsh6 does not give ioctl errors when using tcsh in backquotes.
One thing you are not mentioning is that most users don't know what
where is, and couldn't write a shell script if they had to. So this
isn't really a generic problem.
Marc
