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From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany
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Reply-To: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
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Subject: Why is 'which' broken? (was: Where is the documentation for ibcs2?)
To: chuckr@glue.umd.edu (Chuck Robey)
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 14:12:41 +0100 (MET)
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951127191747.16234D-100000@latte.eng.umd.edu> from "Chuck Robey" at Nov 27, 95 07:20:35 pm
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Chuck Robey writes:
> 
> On Mon, 27 Nov 1995, Greg Lehey wrote:
> 
> > BTW, 'which' is broken.  It doesn't pay any attention to the PATH
> > environment variable, so it can't tell you which one you'll run, just
> > the one it thinks most likeley.  This can be *very* confusing for a
> > newbie.
> 
> Greg, I hope I haven't taken your remark above too out of context, but 
> I'd like to contest your assertion of 'which' being broken, seeing as it 
> works quite well for me.  I know it certainly does take MY path into 
> account.  Could you explain why you think it's broken?

Well, the reason why I *thought* it was broken was

1.  It used to be broken in BSD/386.
2.  When I tried it here, I created a file ls in my home directory,
    which is at the front of my path.  which ls didn't find it.

The problem was that I hadn't set ls to be executable, so this was
correct behaviour.  After setting it executable (and looking at the
source), I see that it does, in fact, work correctly.

Mea culpa
Greg