Re: Behavior of 'mkdir'

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 3:25 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 23-Jul-2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
>
> | I'd like to also notice that Matlab manual states that mkdir returns 1
> | on success and 0 on failure, so apparently they consider a mkdir of
> | existing directory as success (but they explain more in the next
> | paragraph).
> | In the same situation, GNU's mkdir reports a failure, so I assume
> | that's what POSIX wants. Can anyone check the Windows MKDIR? I'd
> | expect the same behaviour. Given that, I think that Octave's way makes
> | more sense and I'd vote for leaving it as it is.
>
> Making more sense and providing something that is useful to Octave
> users who want compatibility appear to conflict here.  So it may be
> better to provide compatible behavior.  I know that is what I would
> prefer to have if I were porting some Matlab code to Octave that
> relied on this feature, because then the code would just work and I
> wouldn't have to pause and think about what to do and meanwhile curse
> the idiot Octave developers who tried to do the "right thing" (more
> likely, I wouldn't know what the "right thing" was and would just
> think the developers were idiots).
>

OK, I take the point. In that case, I suppose the issue should be
mentioned explicitly in the docs, because there are plenty of Octave
users without much prior exposition to Matlab, and if I were to guess
the behaviour, I would guess the way it works now.

Wolfgang, do you want to fix this yourself?

> jwe
>



-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz