Re: avoid mkdir/selinux failure when mknod is a shell built-in

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> According to Jim Meyering on 4/16/2008 6:57 AM:
> |   $ PATH=. /bin/sh -c 'exec mknod --version'|head -1
> |   /bin/sh: mknod: --: unknown option
>
> Ouch - this looks like a POSIX compliance bug in exec; I'm adding
> bug-autoconf to the distribution in case we want to document this corner
> case bug in the shell portability section.  POSIX states that exec is
> supposed to bypass shell builtins (and while special shell builtins, like
> 'exit', give undefined behavior when passed to exec, regular shell
> builtins, like 'fg', are required to exist in PATH even if they can't
> quite do as much work as their builtin counterpart).  Do you know which
> shell heritage the OpenBSD /bin/sh derives from?

This is on 3.9 GENERIC#617 i386 OpenBSD,
and /bin/sh is a hard link to /bin/ksh.
"strings" says it's PDKSH:

  PD KSH v5.2.14 99/07/13.2


> |   $ PATH=. /bin/sh -c 'nice mknod --version' | head -1
> |   mknod (GNU coreutils) 6.10.188-7cb24
>
> | So I'll go with nice.
>
> Sounds nice to me (sorry, couldn't resist :)

:)