On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 03:40:36PM +0000, Pádraig Brady wrote:
On 12/15/2012 03:09 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
[...]
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?
Since -n is a largely redundant option anyway,
I was just keeping it around for compat reasons.
BSD operates like above, so why diverge?
If BSD readlink -n does something totally useless, it's not a reason
to follow and introduce that useless behaviour in GNU readlink.
I've tried to construct an example where readlink -n with multiple
arguments could be used harmlessly, and the only case I have so far
is when readlink's output does not matter (e.g. grep -q ^.) or discarded
completely.
So, please do not add multiple arguments support to readlink -n unless
you can also add a usage example for that feature.