* On Sat, Apr 02, 2011 at 05:05:29PM -0700, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
>On Apr 3,  2:30am, Raghavendra D Prabhu wrote:
>}
>} Xye% ""
>} zsh: permission denied:
>} ============================
>} Is this a bug or some weird quirk ?
>
>Neither, exactly.
>
>You've asked the shell to execute the command named (empty string) found
>anywhere in the directories named in $PATH.
>
>Bash searches the path and finds no executable file named (empty string)
>so it gives up and prints "command not found".
>
>Zsh does the same search, but instead of giving up at the end it repeats
>the attempt with actual execve() system calls, so as to find the "real"
>error that the operating system would report if you were to have typed
>out the full path to the command.  That error is "permission denied"
>because (any directory name)/(empty string) is the same as the directory
>itself, and directories can't be executed as commands.
>
>Aside:  As it happens, if you were to have typed out the full path in
>bash, it first calls execve(), but when that fails with "permission
>denied" bash goes one step further and stat()s the path to determine
>if it is a directory, and if so prints "is a directory" instead of the
>permission error.
Cool. Thanks for the explanation.
--------------------------
Raghavendra Prabhu
GPG ID:D72BE977