Re: Definition of alphanumeric?
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> So, what is the provenance of this CURDIR variable? Has it
> been blessed by POSIX? indeed not. However, I see that both $PWD and
> the pwd utility are sanctioned by POSIX; so for maximal portability
> scripts should *NOT* use CURDIR, the should either use PWD, or call
> pwd themselves, like the example did.
The days when running "pwd" was moderately expensive are long past,
and since PWD can be wrong sometimes, I would suggest every script
that wants the anwser should use "pwd".
Shell script programming is *hard*, because even that is not often
what you want. A shell script should normally continue to work right
if parent directories are changed; converting things to absolute paths
and then using that is frequently a source of gratuitous bugs in this
area.
Thomas
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