[Toybox] [PATCH] getconf: add pathconf(3) variables.

[enh]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 2:45 PM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>
> On 10/05/2018 02:41 PM, enh wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 11:18 AM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 10/02/2018 06:21 PM, enh wrote:
> >>> (in case it's not obvious, this is on top of my other getconf patch
> >>> from earlier today.)
> >>
> >> Applied, but:
> >
> > forgot to push?
>
> Yup.
>
> >> 1) getconf -l only outputting symbol names was intentional, it's that whole
> >> "unix way" Mike Gancarz wrote a loely book about. Output that's easily tool
> >> processable, so you can do "for i in $(getconf)" for example. (Toybox produces
> >> just the command names for the same reason.) I understand your motivation for
> >> changing that, but it makes me wince.
> >
> > my motivation was "how else do we explain which ones are pathconf?",
> > which you need to know because all the others require 0 args, but
> > pathconf requires 1 arg.
>
> The default is "/" if you just go "getconf -a".

weird. that seems far less useful than '.'.

(i'm not really sure how `getconf -a` is even useful. looks like it's
meant for interactive use when you don't know what a thing's called.
so you do `getconf -a | grep -i uucp` or whatever.)

> Hmmm, but it insists when you specify an argument:
>
> $ getconf FILESIZEBITS
> Usage: getconf [-v specification] variable_name [pathname]
>        getconf -a [pathname]
> $ getconf FILESIZEBITS /
> 64
>
> That's really stupid. (The ubuntu one, I mean.)
>
> > it didn't seem reasonable to do that in
> > --help, and although i considered something like adding '*' to the
> > pathconf ones, that breaks the traditional unix style that you were
> > going for but without actually fixing my problem...
>
> Indeed.
>
> >> 2) I missed that upstream has the "-a" option which lists everything, which is
> >> why they don't have a -l. (I don't think ubuntu 14.04 had this, but my test
> >> system died.) We should probably implement that, I might take a stab this weekend.
> >
> > not _everything_ --- just the ones that are defined (and i'm guessing
> > it uses '.' for the pathconf ones?).
>
> Pretty sure it uses /
>
> $ diff -u <(cd /; getconf -a) <(cd /proc; getconf -a)
> $ diff -u <(getconf -a /) <(getconf -a /proc) | wc
>      19      45     742
>
> > but i can do that while you do something more useful :-) i'll fix the
> > "undefined" behavior too, since i found one caller that was expecting
> > it... (but i'll wait for you to push first, in case you'd made
> > additional changes.)
>
> I didn't. I dunno what success look like here either. (And too busy at work to
> think much about it until now.)

the BSD getconf seems less stupid: `getconf -a` shows you the non-path
stuff, `getconf -a PATH` shows you just the path stuff. sounds
reasonable?

> >> Rob
>
> Rob