dircolors and default shell

[Eric Blake]

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Right now, if SHELL is not exported, and dircolors was not given a shell
option, it refuses to output anything:
dircolors: no SHELL environment variable, and no shell type option given

Would it make more sense if dircolors tried to do a bit more sleuthing
before giving up, such as trying getpwuid(getuid())->pw_shell, or
examining files in /proc to reverse-engineer if the parent process of
dircolors is a shell on systems that support procfs?  Or is this too
likely to be fraught with portability problems and potential wrong choices?

One reason I ask is that by default, bash ensures that SHELL exists
(either inherited from the environment, or populated as a shell variable),
but does not put SHELL into the environment when populating the shell
variable.  So it can be rather confusing that 'echo $SHELL' prints
something (the shell variable), but dircolors fails without -b because
SHELL was not exported to the environment.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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