On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 12:21:55PM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > > 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. I'm not sure why 'test_path_exists' exists, as I don't readily see a valid reason why a test should only be interested in whether the path exists, but but not whether it's a file or a directory. Luckily it haven't caught on, and it's only used twice in the whole test suite. However, as shown above, the existend of 'test_path_is_missing' is very much justified. > 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. I'm not sure I understand, 'test_i18ngrep' handles the missing file or not a file cases reasonably well: expecting success: test_i18ngrep ! foo nonexistent-file error: bug in the test script: test_i18ngrep requires a file to read as the last parameter or expecting success: mkdir dir && test_i18ngrep ! foo dir error: bug in the test script: test_i18ngrep requires a file to read as the last parameter > > 1. http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/grep.html