Re: Suggestion: Allow whence to report path(s) for autoloaded functions

[Ian Tegebo <ian.tegebo@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Bart Schaefer
<schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
> I had something of an afterthought on this one ...
>
> On Apr 21,  2:14pm, Ian Tegebo wrote:
> }
> } It seems like 'whence -v _MYFUNC' is the intuitive place to look for
> } this behavior.  I'd imagine it working like:
> }
> } $ whence -v _MYFUNC
> } _MYFUNC is a shell function defined in /blah/path/_MYFUNC
>
> This information could be misleading.  Functions are not always loaded
> from $fpath; they can be defined in init files, edited and/or hand-
> entered on the command line, etc.  To make whence useful, the shfunc
> structure would have to record where the function came from, or whence
> must only report the above if the function has NOT YET been loaded.
>
> There's also the question of what to do about files that are found in
> the $fpath directories but are not marked for autoloading.
>
> } Consequently, removing the '&& break' provides the expected result for
> } 'whence -a':
> }
> } $ whence -av _MYFUNC
> } _MYFUNC is a shell function defined in /blah/path_one/_MYFUNC
> } _MYFUNC is a shell function defined in /blah/path_two/_MYFUNC
>
> That's also misleading.  If _MYFUNC were an executable located in two
> directories, it would be possible to explicitly choose which to run
> by typing the full path name as reported by whence.  For a function,
> there's no [straightforward] way to bypass the fpath search order.
>
> (The non-straightforward way is to run
>    FPATH=/blah/path_two:"$FPATH" _MYFUNC
> but that can produce unexpected results if _MYFUNC calls autoloaded
> functions that should come from /blah/path_one instead.)
>
Thanks for that.

Obviously, I didn't fully appreciate how specific my use case was (nor
did I know about the idiom Peter suggested).  Now I realize I only
wanted a quick way to resolve a named file within a PATH-like
structure, and not the more general case about functions that my
suggestion implied.


-- 
Ian Tegebo