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From: chet@odin.INS.CWRU.Edu (Chet Ramey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Dot in PATH?
Message-ID: <1991Feb6.154650.7396@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
Date: 6 Feb 91 15:46:50 GMT
References: <1423@tau.sm.luth.se> <1991Feb6.084135.11456@wpi.WPI.EDU> <1991Feb06.122658.3584@convex.com>
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In article <1991Feb06.122658.3584@convex.com> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:

>Sorry, take it up with your nearest POSIX 1003.1 representative.  Maybe
>it'll change in a dot-1 revision in 7 years or whatever.  But I doubt 
>it: this is considered a bad thing for various reasons.  The problem 
>is that old systems interpret "" as though it were ".", which is no 
>longer the case in POSIX-compliant applications.  Like Bash.  I kinda 
>woulda thought they've left it up to the kernel the barf (it does on 
>my system no matter what program should try this), but maybe they put
>the code into the shell itself.  

No, you should take it up with your nearest Posix 1003.2 representative.
For backwards compatibility, 1003.2 allows the shell to turn null PATH
entries into `.'.  Like Bash.

      path = extract_colon_unit (path_list, &path_index);
      if (!path || !*path)
        {
          if (path)
            free (path);
          path = savestring ("."); /* by definition. */
        }

However, a `strictly conforming' Posix.2 application will not rely on this
being done, but rather use `.' explicitly.

Chet
-- 
Chet Ramey				``There's just no surf in
Network Services Group			  Cleveland, U.S.A. ...''
Case Western Reserve University
chet@ins.CWRU.Edu		My opinions are just those, and mine alone.