Re: [PATCH] findprog: Support searching in a specified path string

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2019-09-08 at 19:48 +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > My suggestion was that BOTH these functions should not assume the CWD
> > if PATH is empty or missing, not that they should behave differently.
> 
> OK. But what, do you suggest, should the functions do when confronted to
> an empty path? What is 'make' supposed to do when the Makefile defines
>   PATH =
> ?

Very simply, in both the "unset PATH" and "PATH=" cases, it should
report all unqualified (containing no slashes) programs as not found.

That is clearly allowed by POSIX and IMO is the most expected, and
secure, behavior.  Having PATH= be equivalent to PATH=., and even
moreso "unset PATH" be equivalent to PATH=., is quite odd IMO.

> > My personal opinion is that it's not difficult to come up with ways
> > findprog can be useful _in addition_ to simply being a precursor to
> > exec
> 
> In this case we should probably add a flag argument that tells the
> function to do the complete lookup also when the progname contains a
> slash. For now, until someone claims that this functionality would
> be actually useful, I'll leave it as is.

I think this will not be needed.  In the event that someone does need
this they can simply use the findprog-in module instead.