-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Day on 2/11/2008 8:35 PM: | | [ "$(ls -A --color ./dir)" ] && echo "Not Empty" || echo "Empty" | | the echoed message is always "Not Empty", regardless of the fact that ./dir is actually EMPTY. Below is the tested result.
Thanks for the report. However, this is not necessarily a bug. By itself, --color is documented to mean --color=always, in which case ls outputs command sequences to initialize and restore colors back to normal: $ ls -A --color | od -tx1z 0000000 1b 5b 30 6d 1b 5b 6d >.[0m.[m< 0000007 And since that is output (even though it does not show up on the terminal), the string is non-empty, hence the result of the [] test. You really want the color output to be supressed in this context (in $() command substitution, the output is not a terminal, so color escape sequences don't normally make sense to the downstream client), so you should consider using --color=auto instead: $ ls -A --color=auto | od -tx1z 0000000 It may be worth considering a patch to coreutils, such that plain --color implies --color=auto rather than --color=always. For example, this would match how 'git config' reacts when interpreting color options (where 'auto' and 'true' are synonyms, and 'always' must be explicit). It may also be worth a patch to ls to omit color sequences altogether if there is no other output, although this may be more difficult to code and/or justify. - -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHsSpu84KuGfSFAYARAtC2AJ9tkXl1dAXlU9JcXiAOq7B6Te7I5ACdEL5G tbFOIuLMuC30mMwqXvLfsVE= =3aQY -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
