Re: [configure bug while building] flex beta version 2.5.15

[Bruce Lilly]

Paul Eggert wrote:

> OK.  Come to think of it, this is the traditional "ls" behavior.  I'd
> forgotten about that.

Yep, ls is primarily intended for human consumption. Even early shells
had more efficient methods for determining file existence.  I.e. even
in old shells where "test" is a separate program, using test rether
than ls should be a performance win as test doesn't have to do the
formatting etc. that ls does.  And in modern shells, test is a
builtin, so there ought to be a *considerable* performance win. [also,
neither builtin nor external test care about environment variables,
whereas some versions of ls are affected by environment variables
(COLUMNS, LS_COLORS, LS_OPTIONS, etc.)]

Maybe the documentation should mention those points as well, since
evidently there are some shell programmers who either never knew
or forgot them.

Thanks again & best regards,
  Bruce Lilly