Re: [patch] "which"-builtin writes diagnostics to stdout

[Timo Buhrmester <fstd.lkml@gmail.com>]

> } Out of curiosity, what reason would zsh (being more bourne-ish than
> } csh-ish, as far as I can tell) have to maintain this particular csh
> } glitch rather than fixing it?
> 
> What makes you think it's a glitch?
> 
> I.e., "not found" here is not an error message!  It is the answer to the
> question you asked
It seems to me like a diagnostic message intended for human consumption, mainly because there's an infinite number of ways it could answer the same thing (``I can' find <xyz>'' and ``no such <xyz>'', etc).  So unless on the other end of the pipeline you have a human, or a program that understands English, you'll have to deal with this as a special case.  Heck, I could even have a file named ``foobar not found'' sitting around, making things worse. :)

I obviously can't argue with behavior of ancient shells, but IMO there is exactly one correct, unambiguous and machine-readable answer to the ``which'' question:
The empty answer.  

> and you asked for the answer in csh format ("which" is "whence -c").
> If you don't want csh behavior, you should be using "whence" directly
> so that you can omit the "-c" option.
Okay, I didn't know about that.
Doesn't make my point less valid, but I'm glad there's a way out with `whence`.  Thanks.


Timo