Re: readlink(1) of more than one file?

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 12/15/2012 02:54 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:

> From 4217f8a0fc62fa142752e8fc57cd3824ee7b7641 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: =?UTF-8?q?P=C3=A1draig=20Brady?= <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:54:12 +0000
> Subject: [PATCH] readlink: support multiple command line arguments
> 
> This allows efficient processing of processing multiple files,

s/processing of processing/processing of/


> +++ b/NEWS
> @@ -61,6 +61,8 @@ GNU coreutils NEWS                                    -*- 
> outline -*-
>  
>  ** Improvements
>  
> +  readlink now supports multiple arguments.
> +

I think that also --zero should be mentioned in NEWS.


> +++ b/tests/readlink/multi.sh
> [...]
> +readlink -m --zero /1 /1 > out

Jim has mentioned already that a "|| fail=1" should be added
after each test. I want to propose - in retrospective of the recent
"cp --no-preserve=mode" bug (#13119) - that we maybe should add
a new syntax-check rule to enforce such exit code checking.


  $ src/readlink --help
  Usage: src/readlink [OPTION]... FILE...
  Print value of a symbolic link or canonical file name

Shouldn't man/readlink.x also be adapted?

And finally: -n is pretty much useless now with multiple arguments,
because the output is just concatenated together:

  $ src/readlink --no /user /user
  homehome

Wouldn't it be better to allow -n only for single-argument calls,
or use a blank " " as delimiter between the output for multiple
args, or warn?

Have a nice day,
Berny