the subshell's way of chdir'ing

Pavel Roskin proski at gnu.org
Sat Sep 7 00:37:18 UTC 2002


Hello, Oskar!

> Check out this bug:
> 
>   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=150996&repeatmerged=yes
> 
> Short desc: When the subshell is active and you change dir in the
> panels in MC, MC must make the subshell change dir too. This is
> done by something like ╚ cd "`echo '\0..\0..'`"╩ where \0..\0..
> is a bunch of octal numbers. The problem is that some shells
> require 'echo -e' instead of 'echo'.

My understanding of the discussion is that some versions of zsh require 
"-e", at least in some circumstances.  I've applied a patch to use "-e" 
with zsh.

The original reporter was too emotional to mention his version of zsh.  
And by the way, I did test the original code with bash, tcsh and zsh, so 
the subject "Sick way of chdir'ing incompatible with non bash shells" is 
misleading.

> Would it not be possible to fix this by doing
> 
>   cd "`cat some-temp-file-containing-new-working-dir`"
> 
> instead? Slower but more portable I think.

For that matter, using printf (as Clint Adams suggested) would be better,
since reading the filesystem is faster that writing to it.  But I don't 
think we are forced the abandon "echo".

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin




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