Re: bug#15604: [coreutils] [PATCH] md5sum: Add option to ignore non-existant files

[Pádraig Brady]

On 23/11/15 16:41, Jim Meyering wrote:
> I think a common expected usage of --ignore-missing would be
> the case of an SHA1SUM file listing all possibly-verified files for
> which it is common to verify only the one or two downloaded files.
> In any invocation that ends up ignoring *all* file names, I would
> want a loud warning and failure, to be sure that my eyes (and/or
> any tool) notice something is wrong.
> 
> The absence of an "OK" is far easier to miss than a diagnostic.
> At least a few are often expected to be missing, so I see little
> value in emitting "MISSING" diagnostics.

Yes I agree. Thinking more, one could have a syntactically correct
checksum file which is adjusted to comment out certain entries, and
currently sha1sum etc. (with or without --ignore-missing)
will error out unless something is verified:

$ echo '#'|sha1sum --check --ignore-missing
sha1sum: standard input: no properly formatted SHA1 checksum lines found

So given that the existing functionality is to ensure something is verified,
then --ignore-missing should be consistent.

I'll push the attached a bit later.

thanks!
Pádraig

ignore-missing-none.patch
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