Re: bug in pwd POSIX-compliance

[Eric Blake]

Chet Ramey <chet <at> caleb.ins.cwru.edu> writes:
> > 
> > Description:
> > POSIX requires pwd(1) with the -P option to update the PWD environment
> > variable with a version scrubbed of all symlinks.  See
> > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/pwd.html
> > 
> > Bash currently does not do this, but leaves PWD untouched with the
> > non-canonical form of the current directory.
> 
> I agree that the standard says that, but no shell does it that way.  I'm
> going to ignore it for now.  I'd bet that someone pinched the text in
> question from the `cd' description at some point.

On further research, the requirement for `pwd -P' to set PWD was intentional, 
and not a mistake.  See POSIX XRAT A.3 
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/xrat/xbd_chap03.html) under 
Symbolic Links line 1148, which states:

Historically, several shells have had built-in versions of the pwd utility. In 
some of these shells, pwd reported the physical path, and in others, the 
logical path. Implementations of the shell corresponding to IEEE Std 1003.1-
2001 must report the logical path by default. Earlier versions of IEEE Std 
1003.1-2001 did not require the pwd utility to be a built-in utility. Now that 
pwd is required to set an environment variable in the current shell execution 
environment, it must be a built-in utility.

Also, see the followup mails to my defect report, as posted on the Austin 
mailing lists: http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mailarchives/ag/msg08028.html.  
Just because no non-compliant shell does it that way is not an excuse for bash 
to not do it, at least when bash is installed as the compliant sh.

--
Eric Blake