Re: whence (was Re: local unfunction)

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 04/04/18 05:20 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
>
> It's important to note that "whence -m" is doing pattern matching on
> strings, not filename generation.  It's not meant to search for files
> in $PATH, it's meant to do "hash -m

But what is the real world relevance of 'hash -m'?  From almost the 
beginning of my experience with Linux and zsh one has the need to know 
what " $ [command] ENTER " is likely to do, especially in tricky 
situations where there  are scripts and aliases and links and functions 
and builtins and files that might share the same name.  One is pointed 
to whence as the utility that answers that question, but it does not 
answer it accurately when it comes to files.  One way or another, the 
dot directory is simply mishandled, I think that's inescapable.  And the 
other strange things might seem rational as far as the hash table goes, 
but they sure aren't rational as far as using whence for what everyone 
says it is supposed to do and which it almost does do except for the 
anomalies -- find things that execute.  Perhaps whence should be left as 
a curiosity and another builtin developed that does what I think whence 
should do and what needs to be done -- show everything executable named 
[PATTERN] ... all the time.  The pie can be sliced into three clearly 
understandable, non overlapping pieces: 1) Non-file stuff: aliases, 
builtins, etc. 2) Executable files and links on the path.  3) Non 
executable files on the path that zsh will search for in case of " $ 
source [name] ".  Patterns matched if patterns supplied.  Throw in a few 
verbosity levels and that's that.  It could be so simple.