Re: [gnu.utils.bug] AC_PROG_CC_G, et al, are not very robust

[Mo DeJong]

On 18 Jun 2000, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

> On Jun 18, 2000, Alexandre Oliva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> > On Jun 18, 2000, Mo DeJong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >> Ok, how about this patch? It uses cmp instead of wc.
> 
> > Nope, you must use `tail +16'
> 
> +16c, I mean.  Just like GCC's compare.
> 
> But it occurs to me that `tail +16c' may not be supported, so we'd
> have to somehow detect this and fallback to plain cmp, possibly
> misdetecting `-g' as working.

This is really messy. Why is there no way to find the length
of a file in bash? That is all we really want to do. If the
file gets bigger, then -g is supported. What about ls -S,
is that portable?

Some folks have suggested compiling and running a C program
to figure out the length of the file, but that would not
help if I wanted to do a cross compile.

What if we used cmp, but wrote some null bytes over the first
16 bytes of each object file before we did the compare?

Mo DeJong
Red Hat Inc