Re: strange --version issue

[Eric Blake]

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According to John Calcote on 4/9/2008 9:44 AM:
| BTW, what's the purpose of "hash"? I read the help on it, but it only
| explains how to use it, not what its rationale is. Clearly it's a
| command cache, but does looking in the search path for an executable
| take so much more time that a location cache was warranted in the shell?

Yes, it does make a difference.  Particularly if your PATH includes
network drives that might not be present, or on platforms like cygwin
where reading a directory is painfully slow.

One more piece of advice - you can use

$ PATH=$PATH

to force the hash to clear itself after changing where a binary is
installed, and, in bash,

$ shopt -s checkhash

to force bash to be smarter about its hashing choices.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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