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From: franco@MIKEY.BBN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re:  /bin/test and stat(2)
Message-ID: <9501@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 27-Sep-87 17:15:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.9501
Posted: Sun Sep 27 17:15:47 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Sep-87 23:41:42 EDT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 25

Amos:
	If "$foo" is a NULL string /bin/test doesn't replace foo with a '.'.

if [ -d "$foo" ]; then
	do_something $foo/xx
fi

	With the above script if foo is null then the do something will
act on /xx instead of ./xx, clearly two different directories and something
that a programmer might not want to happen.

	You see, my point to the original questions was, Why do I have to
know in advance that test -d "" is going to say that "" is a directory
when it is clearly not a directory.  And, why should I have to do two
tests to find out if "$foo" is a directory, /bin/test should do it.  Relying
on the default sounds to me to be bad programming practice, but I've looked
into source code such as ls.c and it does the same thing, rely on the default,
namely if you do 'ls ""' it does an 'ls .'.  Other programs do the same, chmod
chown, cd and the like.  All of which I consider poorly written if they rely
on the default like that.

	Point 2 is, what if the do_something was cd $foo; rm -rf $foo and
the script ran as root?  OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!

-franco