Eric Blake wrote:
On further research, the requirement for `pwd -P' to set PWD was intentional,
and not a mistake. See POSIX XRAT A.3
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/xrat/xbd_chap03.html) under
Symbolic Links line 1148, which states:
Historically, several shells have had built-in versions of the pwd utility. In
some of these shells, pwd reported the physical path, and in others, the
logical path. Implementations of the shell corresponding to IEEE Std 1003.1-
2001 must report the logical path by default. Earlier versions of IEEE Std
1003.1-2001 did not require the pwd utility to be a built-in utility. Now that
pwd is required to set an environment variable in the current shell execution
environment, it must be a built-in utility.
Also, see the followup mails to my defect report, as posted on the Austin
mailing lists: http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mailarchives/ag/msg08028.html.
Just because no non-compliant shell does it that way is not an excuse for bash
to not do it, at least when bash is installed as the compliant sh.
I understand that, but no shell does it. Period. Even those claiming
compliance, like bash and ksh93. It's an artificial requirement.
Certainly it's non-intuitive for a builtin that's not performing any
modifying action to change $PWD as part of its execution.
Don Cragun's reply didn't include any rationale for pwd's behavior. I
suspect there is none. Even the stated desire for consistency is
not compelling.
If I change bash's behavior in this case, it will be only in posix mode.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
( ``Discere est Dolere'' -- chet )
Live...Laugh...Love
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
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