Subject: Re: bug#9450: Bug report on 'dirname' : when jokers match several files

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Sep 2011 08:24:17 -0600

9450 tag wishlist
thanks

On 09/06/2011 07:53 AM, Laurent TARRISSE wrote:
> Hi
>
> Here this a strange behaviour using 'dirname' with joker filename:

The term is 'wildcard', not 'joker'

> dirname: too many arguments
> Try `dirname --help' for more information.

Thanks for the report.  To some degree, this is expected behavior: POSIX 
requires that portable shell scripts pass exactly one argument to 
dirname, so passing 0 or more than 1 arguments is necessarily in the 
realm of non-portable code, and we would rather error out if we don't 
have any better defined semantics for an extension.

> Could 'dirname' process only its first parameter ?

No.  But there _has_ been requests in the past to add an extension to 
GNU coreutils to match BSD dirname/basename semantics of optionally 
taking more than one parameter:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2010-05/msg00015.html

But so far, no one has submitted patches.  Therefore, I'll keep this bug 
report open, but tag it as a wishlist.

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org