Okay, I did a little more homework on Bourne and found you are right; a
trailing colon in the $PATH does indeed put the current directory at the
end, and a double-colon in the path does indeed count as the current
directory. I knew neither of these things. This mostly retracts my
suggestions.
> > 30 case $PATH in
> > 31 *::) : "not *DIR:" ;;
> > 32 *:) PATH="$PATH:" ;;
> > 33 esac
Line 31 is still messy and counter-intuitive. How about this instead:
case $PATH in
*[^:]:) PATH="$PATH:" ;;
esac
Alternatively, you could remove lines 30-33 and stick a trailing colon on
the end of line 46, like:
for ELEMENT in $PATH:; do
which would have the same effect, though it would run the loop an extra
time if there is an odd number of trailing colons AND there are 3+ AND the
item either isn't in the path or the -a flag was given.
> > If you really want to be able to handle a corner case like that, add a
> > third test to line 57 (line 43 on my patched version) to test for
> > '[ -n "$ELEMENT" ]' (sans single-quotes). This goes third so that it is
> > never used except in these rare corner cases (due to short circuiting).
>
> I'm not sure how rare this is. Any further thoughts?
Disregard. The code is needed as-is due to the empty string's need for
interpretation as the current directory.
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