Why is path not a -aUT type?

Why is path not a -aUT type?

[Zach Riggle]

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It seems to me that having duplicate entries in $PATH / $path is a bit
silly, and makes some things hard to do.

Is there any reason that, by default, we do not

typeset -aUT PATH path


Automatically?

*Zach Riggle*

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Re: Why is path not a -aUT type?

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 06:16:17AM -0500, Zach Riggle wrote:
> It seems to me that having duplicate entries in $PATH / $path is a bit
> silly, and makes some things hard to do.
> 
> Is there any reason that, by default, we do not
> 
> typeset -aUT PATH path
> 
> 
> Automatically?
> 
> *Zach Riggle*

PATH is no array, so "typeset -a" feels wrong.
PATH and path are already tied by default, no?

As for "typeset -U", that's useful to have, but I can definitely see
that one may want to e.g. temporarily add a directory path at the start
of PATH/path and then remove it again without disturbing the old values
of the variables.

-- 
Andreas (Kusalananda) Kähäri
SciLifeLab, NBIS, ICM
Uppsala University, Sweden

.

Re: Why is path not a -aUT type?

[Bart Schaefer]

On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 4:16 AM Zach Riggle <zachriggle@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is there any reason that, by default, we do not
>
> typeset -aUT PATH path

The main one is that PATH is imported from the environment and it's
messy to immediately mung it and push it back there before we've even
finished the rest of pre-RC-file shell initialization.  Further, it's
not up to us to decide how that value should be passed through to
child processes when zsh is used as a launcher by/for some other
application.

Not directly relevant to your intent, but "typeset -T XX xx" implies
that xx is an array, the -a option is not needed (and as Andreas
points out, wrong for XX).

Re: Why is path not a -aUT type?

[Lawrence Velázquez]

On Tue, May 31, 2022, at 1:22 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 4:16 AM Zach Riggle <zachriggle@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Is there any reason that, by default, we do not
>>
>> typeset -aUT PATH path
>
> The main one is that PATH is imported from the environment and it's
> messy to immediately mung it and push it back there before we've even
> finished the rest of pre-RC-file shell initialization.  Further, it's
> not up to us to decide how that value should be passed through to
> child processes when zsh is used as a launcher by/for some other
> application.

It's also presumptuous to assume that all users want this.
I actually stopped deduplicating PATH/path recently because I want
to know when some application or other is trying to modify it behind
my back without having zsh possibly deduplicate the evidence away.

-- 
vq