Re: odd recursion

[Seth Kurtzberg <seth@cql.com>]

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.

>
>
> !DSPAM:41fe79f8244781930316049!
>