Re: ?maybe? RFE?... read -h <symlink>?

[Greg Wooledge]

On Mon, Sep 06, 2021 at 08:41:33AM +0200, Alex fxmbsw7 Ratchev wrote:
> btw in the help you pasted there is the -a arr in question

Can you for the love of glob please STOP top-posting?

> On Mon, Sep 6, 2021, 08:36 felix <felix@f-hauri.ch> wrote:
> > It would be nice if builtins intended to produce *answer* use more or less
> > common switch like `printf -v` behaviour.
> >
> >   usage: realpath [-a array] [-csv] pathname [pathname...]
> >
> >   options:     -a NAME assign the output to shell array NAME rather than
> >                        display it on the standard output
> >                -c      check whether or not each resolved path exists
> >                -s      no output, exit status determines whether path is
> > valid
> >                -v      produce verbose output

Felix's synopsis is not the real one.  It's a proposal.

The real one looks like this:

unicorn:~$ enable -f /usr/lib/bash/realpath realpath
unicorn:~$ help realpath
realpath: realpath [-csv] pathname [pathname...]
    Display pathname in canonical form.
    
    Display the canonicalized version of each PATHNAME argument, resolving
    symbolic links.  The -c option checks whether or not each resolved name
    exists.  The -s option produces no output; the exit status determines the
    validity of each PATHNAME.  The -v option produces verbose output.  The
    exit status is 0 if each PATHNAME was resolved; non-zero otherwise.

Since -v is already taken, the proposed modification used -a instead,

I have no idea why the proposal tries to write the result into an
array variable, though.  That makes no sense to me.