Re: suppressing shell error output

[Mike Frysinger]

On Tuesday 13 September 2005 07:44 pm, Martin Sebor wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Tuesday 13 September 2005 06:52 pm, Martin Sebor wrote:
> >>--  parse PATH and use test to see if the command exists in any of
> >>     the directories (lots of work)
> >
> > you mean `which` ?
>
> Yes, like which but portable. Maybe I could try looking for which
> and use it if it exists, otherwise do the above. But wait, how do
> I look for which in the first place? ;-)

which is pretty well ported ... OS X (Darwin), BSD, Linux have it by 
default ...

afaik, which should only error under really bad circumstances, so something 
like this should work:
which_binary=`which which 2>/dev/null`
test -z "$which_binary" && echo no which available

i guess if you're going to be really super anal about it, you'd wrap the whole 
thing in a local function:
function my_which() {
    if test -z "$which_binary" ; then
        ... your workaround here ...
    else
        $which_binary "$@"
    fi
}

note that you cant rely on exit status on which, just output ... stupid OS X 
ships a broken which that always exits 0 even if the specified utility isnt 
found
-mike