Re: whence question

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 13/01/17 09:11 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jan 2017, Ray Andrews wrote:
>
>> Is this to be expected:
>>
>>     $ touch grub-r
>>
>>     $ whence -ma grub-r*
>>
> To expound a little on Daniel's answer, touching the file has made
> "grub-r*" into a pattern that generates a file name, so instead of looking
> for all commands matching the pattern you're looking for all commands
> matching the name of the file -- of which there are none.
I roughly understand that.  I know that if a glob has  no match it's 
passed verbatim so whence sees what it's supposed to see, but the fact 
that there is a match fouls that up.  It's a bit of a bother but I can 
see that without 'noglob' the shell's zeal for expanding globs is in 
more or less direct conflict with the intention of the 'm' switch which 
supposes that whence will handle globing itself.  I can also see that 
that might not be fixable even in theory for reasons of consistency, 
OTOH I can also speculate that whence might have this noglob built into 
it automatically whenever the 'm' is used so that there is no conflict 
-- but that might not be possible without the alias.  Certainly what 
happens is a bit of a gotcha, the incidental local match surely should 
not matter.  Shouldn't 'm' have complete control of globing, since 
that's what it's for?  Dunno, could/should whence be an alias by 
default?  or, since whence is a builtin, might it be possible to prevent 
the globing in the first place?  I understand that that wouldn't be 
possible with an external command but since it's in the family a bit of 
hokey pokey might be possible.  Sorta whence prepending 'noglob' to 
itself automatically.  Or maybe that's a really dumb idea.
>