Re: Are there users of ash's "pathopts"? Do other shells have such a thing?

[Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>]

On 4/1/23 21:13, Harald van Dijk wrote:
>> I assume it's rarely (never?) used in the wild.
>> It interferes with valid directories with percents in names.
>> It's non-standard, and not a typical feature of other Bourne-like shells
>>    (maybe we (ash family) are the only ones?)
>> Code complication to support it is a chore.
> 
> It is not clear to me whether you mean "non-standard" as "conflicts with the standard", or "not required by the standard".

"not required".

More importantly, no one else among shells seems to have such extension.
This means it's probably not terribly useful.

There is value in *not* having extensions "just because we can".
Extensions fragment user base.
IOW: extensions make sense when they are *useful*.

Shells already have way too much of featuritis.
Just now, I learned that CDPATH is a thing... oh god.
Yet another danger of subtle bugs in scripts when one
of their innocuous "mkdir subdir; cd subdir" suddenly
cd's somewhere else...
..and this "feature" seems to be in bash too,
and who knows where else.