Re: -d option not working. . .?

[Pierre Gaston]

On 9/12/07, Michael Williams <lists@mgreg.com> wrote:

> Forgive me for saying so, and please appreciate both the sarcasm and
> irony, but I've never been one for "that's the way it's always
> been".  I mean, if we all thought that way, we'd be a bunch of
> bloodletting flat-earthers. . .no?  ;)
>
> That said, I'm sure these BASH and POSIX guys were (and still are) a
> lot smarter than myself.  So I'll rest my faith on that and see about
> doing a bit more getting familiar.

I think you underestimate both the power of heritage and specification and
your own intelligence.

Even if history and posix are not the only justifications for the way
bash is, in my humble opinion they play an important role.

See how people write and maintain a "new" shell like dash so that it
is striclty posix compliant, no more no less, and how a "modern"
distribution like ubuntu adopt it as its default /bin/sh.  (pressing
people to write "posix script" without, say, arrays for instance)

As for  guys being smarter, or rather that the design of the bourne
shell is the best there is, not everybody agrees,  see for instance
what Tom Duff says about the bourne shell
in his "Design Principles" of his rc shell:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/rc.html