Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2022 07:58:47 -0500
From: "Eric Blake via austin-group-l at The Open Group"
<austin-group-l@opengroup.org>
Message-ID: <20220722125847.tidcrt7a6ntvy...@redhat.com>
| [If readlink is implemented as a shell builtin, then you could have an
| extension where:
|
| readlink -v var -n -- "$name"
If something like that were implemented, the -n would be a waste of
space (there) the variable would always be assigned the value of the
symlink, the -n is only to suppress the \n that is printed after that
when writing it to stdout.
The uses in cmdsubs you dissected are clearly not what -n is intended
for (though I wonder if perhaps something similar in csh, if that
ability is there - it has been so long since I looked at that - might
have a different outcome).
Aside from that possibility the only reason would seem to be the same
as why echo (real ones) have -n (and trashy ones have \c) and why
printf(1) needs a \n to print one ... there are times that it is useful
to write a partial line to stdout (or wherever) and there's no reason
that the output of readlink could not be intended to be a part of such
a gradually constructed output line.
kre
