From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 5805 invoked from network); 4 Dec 1996 21:21:25 -0000 Received: from euclid.skiles.gatech.edu (list@130.207.146.50) by coral.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 4 Dec 1996 21:21:25 -0000 Received: (from list@localhost) by euclid.skiles.gatech.edu (8.7.3/8.7.3) id PAA17575; Wed, 4 Dec 1996 15:59:03 -0500 (EST) Resent-Date: Wed, 4 Dec 1996 15:59:03 -0500 (EST) From: Zoltan Hidvegi Message-Id: <199612042059.VAA04768@bolyai.cs.elte.hu> Subject: Re: bug with empty path In-Reply-To: <199612040900.KAA20985@sgi.ifh.de> from Peter Stephenson at "Dec 4, 96 10:00:21 am" To: pws@ifh.de (Peter Stephenson) Date: Wed, 4 Dec 1996 21:59:41 +0100 (MET) Cc: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Eotvos University, Budapest, Hungary Phone: (36 1)2669833 ext: 2667, home phone: (36 1) 2752368 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL27 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Resent-Message-ID: <"50RHc2.0.YI4.MOUfo"@euclid> Resent-From: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/2536 X-Loop: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu Precedence: list Resent-Sender: zsh-workers-request@math.gatech.edu Peter Stephenson wrote: > I see the point, but do you really want to try and explain this to the > average user? ``The PATH is sometimes empty, and sometimes really empty, > but only if you set it as an array; if it looks empty, it may be empty > or really empty; if it's empty but not really empty it pretends to be > set to the current directory...'' I tell the user that path is an array and the real thing is the path variable. PATH just tries to represent is as a scalar for compatibility reasons. > Still, there's some confusion in having both $path and $PATH which is > probably unavoidable, so I can live with it. When zsh is called as sh, there is no path just PATH. And if we modify the behaviour of path we should also modify the other variables: mailpath, fpath, module_path or any other array/scalar pairs. But that would just remove functionality with cost of addig extra code. Zoltan