Kamil Dudka wrote:
> Hello Tak,
>
> On Friday 24 of July 2009 00:17:07 Tak Ota wrote:
>> As a part of file name manipulation commands, in addition to the
>> current three commands (basename, dirname, pathchk) could you consider
>> introduction of a generic path name manipulation command? See
>> attached example.
>
> did you considered use of canonicalize_file_name() from gnulib (also available
> in glibc)? It can manage many of operations implemented in your code. The
> function operates on ordinary C strings. The most frequently operation in
> your example is concatenation which is AFAIK trivial operation in all shells.
> So maybe we can do most of this by combining shell string concatenation and
> canonicalization.
>
> I am not sure what is the semantic of "negative paths". Should it cut
> prefix/postfix of the path? Or am I missing something?
>
>> The need of this type of command can be satisfied by combination of
>> other commands such as sed and awk but it is quite cumbersome as the
>> operation is frequently required in writhing Makefiles and shell
>> scripts in software development.
>
> Actually I don't know if we have some utility equivalent to
> canonicalize_file_name() function in coreutils now.
We do. It's called readlink:
Usage: readlink [OPTION]... FILE
Display value of a symbolic link on standard output.
-f, --canonicalize canonicalize by following every symlink in
every component of the given name recursively;
all but the last component must exist
-e, --canonicalize-existing canonicalize by following every symlink in
every component of the given name recursively,
all components must exist
-m, --canonicalize-missing canonicalize by following every symlink in
every component of the given name recursively,
without requirements on components existence
-n, --no-newline do not output the trailing newline
-q, --quiet,
-s, --silent suppress most error messages
-v, --verbose report error messages
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
Report readlink bugs to bug-coreutils@gnu.org
GNU coreutils home page: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
General help using GNU software: <http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>
_______________________________________________
Bug-coreutils mailing list
Bug-coreutils@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
