Re: odd recursion

[William Scott <wgscott@chemistry.ucsc.edu>]

Thanks very much to everyone who answered.

Just to clarify -- I know the simplest solution is just to avoid it, 
the next most simple solution is to use
zsh/ksh function syntax rather than posix syntax.

The main point of the question was that I don't see how/why it is a 
recursion, from the logic of the expressions, which is why I said there 
was some sort of fundamental gap in my understanding of how zsh works.

On Jan 31, 2005, at 12:44 PM, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:

> William Scott wrote:
>
>>>
>>> I hope you have your reasons to tell the shell "a is b" and "a is c"
>>> at the same time. Basically your aliasing ls two times 
>>> simultaneously.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> The interesting thing is that if I issue
>>
>> "which lf"  it tells me that lf is aliased, not that it is defined as 
>> a function.  If I then issue the newly defined lf command, the 
>> function takes precedence over the alias (which is what I understood 
>> to be the expected behavior), which I can see from the error messages 
>> produced.
>>
>> The problem arose because a user made the alias without checking to 
>> see that the function was defined, and that the function was written 
>> as a posix function and defined after the alias in the sequence of 
>> shell initialization.
>>
>> If the alias is defined after the posix function is defined, the 
>> problem doesn't arise.
>
> I don't see any way around this, without taking away good and 
> necessary behavior.
>
> You can always use the really simple solution, which is not to have a 
> name clash at all.  I use a short script I wrote to tell me whether a 
> name is already defined somewhere.  It's got a bug in it w.r.t. 
> functions (which makes it useless at the moment) but I'll (presumably) 
> fix that.
>
> IMHO, it is always better to keep things explicit rather than relying 
> on the sequence of operations in the implementation.
>
> A warning, as someone suggested, might be a better solution.
>