On 10/3/17 4:14 PM, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > > > On Sun, 1 Oct 2017, Chet Ramey wrote: > >> On 9/30/17 4:20 AM, Mikulas Patocka wrote: >> >>> Is there some reason why do we need to check if $OLDPWD is a real >>> directory? dash and ksh accept the $OLDPWD variable, but don't poke it >>> with the stat syscall. zsh clears $OLDPWD. >> >> It makes no sense to inherit it if it doesn't name a directory (or >> "pathname" in the Posix standard), other than the sort of lazy evaluation >> that will prevent your particular problem. > > Does something bad happen if we inherit $OLDPWD that points to a > non-existing directory? Will some script malfunction because of it?
`cd -' will fail, of course. That's where $OLDPWD gets used. And who knows whether some script will fail? It's impossible to say. -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/