Moazam Rajas Sun hosted weblog garbage collection II

The Solaris which(1) is the original csh script implementation, and hasn't changed substantially since 1990. I'll file a bug for this case, although it may say "consider F/OSS implementation". In the meantime, a suggested workaround that actually uses $PATH is "ksh whence oogabooga".

Posted by Stephen Hahn on June 10, 2004 at 11:31 PM PDT #

Unclear that this is a bug. I chatted up one of our POSIX Standards reps (and experts). To make a long exposition short: The standards have a basic principle that as long as a utility correctly performs its function, it should exit with a 0 exit status unless documented to do otherwise (such as false). Since the man pages for which and csh do not say what constitutes correct performance, there is no guidance that I know of for what which "should" return as an exit status. So, while I can imagine that it would be more useful to call this an error, changing the specification a dozen or so years after scripts have come to rely on this behavior seems risky.

Posted by Keith Bierman on June 11, 2004 at 06:53 PM PDT #