Richard Neill wrote:
1)substr support for a negative length argument. For example, stringZ=abcdef echo ${stringZ:2:-1} #prints cdei.e. ${string:x:y} returns the string, from start position x for y characters. but, if x is negative, start from the right hand side and if y is negative, print up to the end, -y.This would work the same way as PHP, and be extremely useful for, say, removing an extension from a filename.
Sounds good, but your example is bad... how do you know how long the "extension" is? :-) Consider 'foo.txt', 'bar.tar.gz', 'core.1234', etc. But this would be useful for other things, I would think.
4)A way to find a relative directory path. i.e. the solution to: If I were to start in directory /home/me/x/y/z and I wanted to get to /home/me/x/a/b/c then, what argument would I need to provide to 'cd' ?
Answer: /home/me/x/a/b/c. Well, the shell's built-in may do the "obvious" thing, but if you are expecting to feed paths to programs this way, symlinks will come and bite you. :-) There a quite a few places "in" my home directory where '../foo' and ( cd .. ; ./foo )' are not equivalent.
5)An enhancement to read/readline, such that one can specify the initial value with which the buffer is filled.
Well, that, and a way to specify possible completions. :-) -- Matthew "But I want to cast Magic Missile!" _______________________________________________ Bug-bash mailing list Bug-bash@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-bash
