Re: A request for addition of a command

[Kamil Dudka]

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. If not I think it could
be helpful to implement such utility.

Kamil