On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Andrew Morgan wrote: > David Lee wrote: > > Hence my suggestion of "-f", which seems widely available, and doesn't > > adversely affect the use to which we are putting it (although it may be > > possible to dream up pathological cases if someone has gone in behind the > > back of "make" with malice aforethought). > But your patch says: > ! if [ ! -r include/security ]; then ln -sf . > "-r or -f" Which is it? -L?:) >From test(1) on Linux (sh-utils-1.16): -e file True if file exists -f file True if file exists and is a regular file. ... -L file True if file exists and is a symbolic link. ... -r file True if file exists and is readable. I don't know how portable -L is, but -f is certain to not give the correct behavior on any OS that follows the above semantics. So -- if we have the option, it seems to me that -L is what we want. (If someone's put something there that's not a symlink, there's no reason not to stomp on it, as it will probably break the build anyway.) If neither -L nor -e is portable, the only option left is -r, I guess.. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
