Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!hybrid!scifi!bywater!uunet!convex!news
From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Dot in PATH?
Message-ID: <1991Feb06.122658.3584@convex.com>
Date: 6 Feb 91 12:26:58 GMT
References: <3109@wyse.wyse.com> <1423@tau.sm.luth.se> <1991Feb6.084135.11456@wpi.WPI.EDU>
Sender: news@convex.com (news access account)
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Distribution: comp
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Lines: 35
Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com

From the keyboard of fenn@wpi.WPI.EDU (Brian Fennell):
:In article <1423@tau.sm.luth.se> d87-man@sm.luth.se (Mikael Adolfsson) writes:
:>bob@wyse.wyse.com (Bob McGowen x4312 dept208) writes:
:>
:>deleted discussion...
:>
:>>PATH=:/usr/lbin...<rest of path deleted>
:>>    ^^
:>>This is a null path entry which defautlt to dot.  You can have null
:>>entries anywhere by either placing two colons together (::) or placing
:>>a single colon at the beginning (as you did) or at the end.
:>
:>This is not true for BASH.
:>At least version 1.05.11 allow null entries
:>without interpreting them as dot.
:
:That is definately a bug in BASH!
:Even brain-dead csh fools with "path" and leaves "PATH" in standard
:format.

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.  

--tom
--
"Still waiting to read alt.fan.dan-bernstein using DBWM, Dan's own AI window 
manager, which argues with you for 10 weeks before resizing your window." 
### And now for the question of the month:  How do you spell relief?   Answer:
U=brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu; echo "/From: $U/h:j" >>~/News/KILL; expire -f $U