On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 9:05 AM, James Youngman <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 6:32 PM, Eric Blake <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 05/06/2010 09:13 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote: >>>> Even if it is also available as a shell builtin, that does not >>>> alleviate the requirement to also have it available on $PATH. >>> >>> echo(1) *is* available in $PATH in the build environment, just like all >>> of Coreutils. >>> >>> What would you think of ‘--with-echo’? >> >> Why is xargs blindly calling /bin/echo? > > I don't know, it's been that way since the first checkin in the > (current) repository, dating from 1996. > > >> Wouldn't it just be simpler to >> change xargs.c' definition of default_cmd to be "echo" instead of >> "/bin/echo" and using execvp instead of execve? > > I guess there will be a slight performance penalty, but if we want to > prevent that we have the option of searching the path for the binary > and using the absolute path. > > >> In a compliant >> environment, you are guaranteed that echo(1) is on PATH, and calling the >> wrong echo because of a non-compliant environment is not really xargs' >> concern. In other words, instead of making it more complex by adding >> configure --with-echo, I propose making it simpler by dropping the >> hard-coding in the first place. > > I guess it makes sense. Would you like to go ahead and make the change?
I just got another Hydra fail notification because of this issue, so I'll go ahead and fix it. James.
