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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Default PATH setting - reduce to something more sensible?
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2025 12:38:03 +0100
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On 24.01.2025 23:00, Keith Thompson wrote:
> Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:
>> On 24.01.2025 14:46, Dan Cross wrote:
> [...]
> 
> /usr/bin/which is limited in what it can do.  It follows POSIX-specified
> behavior for $PATH; it doesn't recognize any shell-specific rules. [...]

Sure.

> [...]
>> The settings  PATH=~/bin  and  PATH="~/bin"  respectively shall
>> result in the same behavior across shells when searching for
>> programs; in the first case looking into "/home/someuser/bin/"
>> and in the second case looking into "./~/bin/" (i.e. a path
>> component with a local directory named "~").
> 
> What do you mean by "shall result?

I mean that a shell should behave consistently. (I think Bash does
not in the given case.)

> All shells that conform to POSIX behave as you describe.  bash doesn't
> conform to POSIX unless you ask it to.  Neither do csh, tcsh, and fish.

We were speaking about shell programming, so [seriously] I don't
consider Csh and Tcsh as sensible sample shells for the discussion.
(Thinking about it, I wonder whether Bash inherited tilde-handling
from Csh, maybe; that would at least explain something.)

(I don't know Fish, so I cannot comment on that.)

> [...]

> BTW, it hadn't occurred to me that you can have a relative path in a
> component of $PATH, but it does seem to work.  I won't be taking
> advantage of this information.

Yes. Some prefer to add '.' to PATH. (Though I have no intention
to discuss that habit.)

Janis