Re: cd

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Levente Torok <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 9:45 AM, Olaf Till <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 05:17:03PM -0400, John W. Eaton wrote:
>> > On 25-Aug-2008, Levente Torok wrote:
>> >
>> > | Hi All,
>> > |
>> > | I ran into an other simple compatibility issue:
>> > | In octave, 'cd' does not return anything however it should (pwd).
>> >
>> > Yes, this is a known "problem".  I'd consider a patch.
>> >
>> > But one thing that should not be "fixed" is that cd by itself should
>> > change the current directory to $HOME.  ...
>>
>> Agree that this should not be "fixed", but wouldn't it be weird then
>> if the current directory is printed before 'cd' changes to the home
>> directory?  Olaf
>
>
> If matlab compatilibity is a target, than it should follow what matlab does.
> In matlab "cd" return the current dir and does not change it!.
> "cd ~"
> returns nothing but changes curr dir.
>

Matlab compatibility matters, but is not an absolute rule. Most of
Octave users use also other tools than Matlab. When you have such an
ubiquitous command such as cd, you should consider compatibility in a
more general sense. "cd" without arguments always meant "cd ~" on
Unix. Matlab's behaviour is apparently modeled after "cd" in DOS
(which knew nothing about home directories).
Though I'm sure that Windoze users are an important group (perhaps
even most important), I bet that most of them actually do not use
Windows command line much, while most of Linux and Mac users probably
do.
But I'm not sure about this. Perhaps some Windows users could tell us
whether they care about this matter. If they don't, I'd vote for not
changing the behaviour.


> L
>
>



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