Re: A few documentation issues, and a question

[Michael Albinus]

Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all,

Hi Clément,

> tramp-find-executable says this:
>
>   "Searches for PROGNAME in $PATH and all directories mentioned in DIRLIST. 
> […]
> Returns the absolute file name of PROGNAME, if found, and nil otherwise. […]"
>
> But when a program in in the PATH, tramp returns the program name
> prefixed with a backslash instead:
>
> (tramp-find-executable "sh")
> ⇒ "\\sh"

The reason behind is to suppress aliases for the commands. There were
problems in the past, when somebody has aliased for example "ls".

Of course, one could send "unalias -a" at the very beginning, but this
might be annoying for users who want to use their aliases in interactive
shells.

> This wouldn't be much of an issue, except for the fact that this
> syntax isn't compatible with tramp-sh-process-file-handler (it quotes
> the program name).  Which one is right? The docs, or the behavior (I'd
> vote for fixing the behavior :)

Do you have an example for this?

> (Btw, is that check with `which \%s | wc -w` right? Wouldn't it break
> if the program can be found in a directory that contains a space?)

Yes, this could be a problem. Do you expect to happen this in real life?

> Another doc bug:
>
> tramp-tramp-file-p says:
>
> "Return t if NAME is a string with Tramp file name syntax."
>
> but it returns an int, not t.  Maybe it should use string-match-p
> instead of string-match?

string-match-p didn't exist, when this function was written aeons
ago. And it also returns a natnum. I've fixed this. Committed to the
Tramp and Emacs (branch emacs-26) repositories.

> Thanks!
> Clément.

Best regards, Michael.