Re: path/PATH function

[Sweth Chandramouli <sweth@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu>]

On Wed, Nov 19, 1997 at 08:27:51AM -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> This "feature" is restricted at present to a few pairs of variables that are
> hardwired at compile time.  They include:
> 
> CDPATH		cdpath
> FPATH		fpath
> MAILPATH	mailpath
> MANPATH		manpath
> PATH		path
	maybe the documentation i have isn't that complete, but all i could find 
in the manpage for zshparam is the fact that the variables like cdpath and path 
exist and are "special" varaibles; there isn't any mention of how they are 
mapped on to their capitalized counterparts.  my next question, then, is if 
these do, in fact, work the way i surmised (that is, they remove redundancies 
and map their colon-delimited versions onto the capitalized equivalent 
variable).  also, what exactly is the format for defining them?  is it just 
paren-enclosed, space-delimited lists?

> You might also wish to look into `typeset -U` which causes an array to
> remove all non-unique elements from itself.  A function to test whether
> any given directory is already in your path shouldn't be necessary.
	the version of typeset on my system doesn't seem to support this option 
(or at least, the man page doesn't mention it).  typeset doesn't return an error 
if i try to use the -U switch, however; could someone summarize the syntax so i 
could see if it is, in fact, implemented?
	
	tia,
	sweth.