On Wed, Mar 27 2019, SZEDER Gábor wrote: > On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 11:09:18AM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: >> > There are likewise several that use one of >> > ! test -e path/to/filename >> > or >> > ! test -f path/to/filename >> > or >> > test ! -f path/to/filename >> > which could be replaced by >> > test_path_is_missing path/to/filename >> >> Interesting that for some we use the 'test_is_there/test_is_not_there' >> pattern and for others 'test_is_there [!]'. E.g >> test_path_exist/test_path_is_missing v.s. test_i18ngrep. > > It's unclear what the '!' should negate in case of 'test_path_is_file > ! file'. What if 'file' does exists, but it's not a file but a > directory, socket, fifo, or symlink? 'test ! -f file' returns success > in these cases as well. > > OTOH, it's quite clear what the negation should mean in case of > 'test_i18ngrep'. *Should* we make it better? Yeah sure, maybe. I'm just pointing out for context to someone poking at this for the first time that now we sometimes do "! foo <arg>" v.s. "foo <arg>" as "foo_is <arg>" and "foo_not <arg>" and other times "foo [!] <arg>". So yeah, maybe we should improve things to disambiguate the cases you mentioned, but right now e.g. "test_path_exists" and "test_path_is_missing" are just "test -e" and "! test -e", respectively. The same caveats you've mentioned also apply to "test_i18ngrep" b.t.w., there we squash the 3x standard exit codes of grep[1] into a boolean, and thus e.g. ignore the difference between <file> not matching an <file> being a directory or whatever. 1. http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/grep.html
