Re: /usr/bin/which is a csh script!!?!

Greg hits the nail on the head. When I was brought into the dark side, It was as
a lowly tape-swapper on a mix of pdp-11, Vax-780 and Dec-10 nodes and had to
interact with /bin/sh, /bin/csh, VMS and galaxy/tops-10. In making the 4.1BSD
host my natural home I became infected with /bin/csh as a CLI.

But pragmatism 21 years later means I have accepted the norms of the staff I now
manage, and run bash, as they do. (an abberation into tcsh for a few years is
best forgotten) Alas, my memory fades, and 'which' has more pervasive wiring in
the drum than whence or command -v

Like greg, I've hacked around it.

I apologize for waking up a long, long dead thread. One cluebat hit was enough
for me.

cheers
	-George

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 12:37:12 -0400 (EDT) "Greg A. Woods" <woods <at> weird.com>
wrote:

> [ On Wednesday, April 30, 2003 at 09:27:14 (-0400), Andrew Brown wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: /usr/bin/which is a csh script!!?!
> >
> > imho, the real bug is shells that provide aliases but don't provide
> > something like which(1) as a builtin, which is the only really wrong
> > case (shells that provide aliases and will only tell you that
> > something is an alias aside).  which shells are the broken ones?
> 
> The only shell so broken in any official NetBSD release is "csh" itself,
> which is why there's a which(1) script just for it.
> 
> The real problem that you (and perhaps others) seem to have missed
> completely is that there are lots of users who have either grown up
> accustomed to typing "which" to find out what kind of thing some command
> is, or have been taught to do so by some unthinking mentor who grew up
> doing so.  As a result those who use a "Real Shell(tm)" with a "command"
> or "whence" built-in that "Does The Right Thing(tm)", will still end up
> trying to use "which" instead, and thus why even on my systems where
> I've obliterated and eliminated all traces of "csh", I still have a
> "which" command, now implemented as a /bin/sh script.  
> 
> -- 
> 								Greg A. Woods
> 
> +1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods <at> ieee.org>;          
> <woods <at> robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods <at> planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the
> Weird <woods <at> weird.com>

--

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George Michaelson       |  APNIC
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