Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!ogicse!intelhf!ichips!iwarp.intel.com!gargoyle!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: pwd?
Message-ID: <1991Apr23.145850.6064@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 23 Apr 91 14:58:50 GMT
References: <6330@male.EBay.Sun.COM> <1991Apr17.165554.16507@iwarp.intel.com> <129476@uunet.UU.NET>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 21

In article <129476@uunet.UU.NET> rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>>Unless you're willing to stat a lot of directories, the fastest way is:
>>
>>	chop($path = `cd $name && pwd`);

>I have never seen a shell that treated cd properly with respect
>to && and ||. Try "cd /bogon || echo failed".

The "proper" thing for any shell that offers to run /bin/sh scripts
to do is to exit immediately with an error status when a cd fails.
Unfortunatly some don't, and more unfortunate there is no way to
control it (i.e. IMHO as a sometimes useful extension there should
be an option to enable it in a script that expects to continue past
a cd).  As it is, all those historically correct shell scripts that
cd somewhere ; rm -f * will happily eat your current directory when
you replace /bin/sh with ksh and "somewhere" goes away.
Anyway, just to maintain some relevance to perl - in the above case
it doesn't matter much.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us