Subject: Re: bug#20679: A bug of pwd

From: Bob Proulx <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 May 2015 20:35:37 -0600

Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> First of all, I want to mention that the invoked 'pwd' is a builtin
> in most shells, which means you have to e.g. specify the path like
> /bin/pwd to be sure to invoke the coreutils version of it.

A very, very small comment.  This is all true but the wording makes it
sound somewhat like a recommendation to use /bin/pwd in order to get
the coreutils program.  I don't think that was intended.  I think
instead it was intended only that normally the user has called the
builtin pwd and the builtin is not coreutils and therefore nothing we
would do about it here.  Reports about the builtin would go to the
shell.

One can compare the builtin by using both a plain "pwd" version and
comparing against the "/bin/pwd" coreutils version in order to test
differences between them.  If they work the same then it is very
unlikely it would be a bug since they are independent implementations.

For typical scripting it would be normal to continue to use the plain
"pwd" and use the shell builtin version.  But proper shell quoting is
still needed.  :-)

Bob