The other day I was setting up my shell environment on a different
system, starting with copying over my .profile and .kshrc, along with
a few other scripts.
Later I tried to run one of my scripts in a different window, but that
window's ksh93 couldn't find it, while other shells in my other windows
could. After digging a big, I realized that the one shell was started
during the window of time where my .kshrc ( with my scripts directory
added to $PATH ) had been copied to the new system, but before the
scripts directory had been created. Since the directory did not exist
at the time $PATH was set, ksh93 was not attempting to access it again.
Here's a transcript of me reproducing the same conditions:
ivan at excalibur:~$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/X11/bin
ivan at excalibur:~$ PATH=$PATH:~/bin
ivan at excalibur:~$ mkdir bin
ivan at excalibur:~$ cp /usr/bin/hostname bin/foo
ivan at excalibur:~$ foo
ksh93: foo: not found [No such file or directory]
ivan at excalibur:~$ ~/bin/foo
excalibur
ivan at excalibur:~$ PATH=$PATH
ivan at excalibur:~$ foo
ksh93: foo: not found [No such file or directory]
ivan at excalibur:~$ A=$PATH
ivan at excalibur:~$ PATH=.
ivan at excalibur:~$ PATH=$A
ivan at excalibur:~$ foo
excalibur
ivan at excalibur:~$
Watching the process with truss, I can see it walk down the directories
in $PATH, except the the directory that previously didn't exist:
write(4, " f o o\n\0\0", 6) = 6
lseek(4, 0, SEEK_CUR) = 17082
stat("/usr/bin/foo", 0xFFFFFD7FFFDFE1F0) Err#2 ENOENT
stat("/usr/sfw/bin/foo", 0xFFFFFD7FFFDFE1F0) Err#2 ENOENT
stat("/usr/ccs/bin/foo", 0xFFFFFD7FFFDFE1F0) Err#2 ENOENT
stat("/usr/X11/bin/foo", 0xFFFFFD7FFFDFE1F0) Err#2 ENOENT
stat("/usr/bin/foo", 0xFFFFFD7FFFDFE070) Err#2 ENOENT
stat("/usr/sfw/bin/foo", 0xFFFFFD7FFFDFE070) Err#2 ENOENT
stat("/usr/ccs/bin/foo", 0xFFFFFD7FFFDFE070) Err#2 ENOENT
stat("/usr/X11/bin/foo", 0xFFFFFD7FFFDFE070) Err#2 ENOENT
write(2, 0x004175B0, 50) = 50
k s h 9 3 : f o o : n o t f o u n d [ N o s u c h f
i l e o r d i r e c t o r y ]\n
time() = 1234473863
This happens in ksh93 in OpenSolaris/Solaris Express, but not with the
older version of dtksh that's included with Solaris Express.
ivan at excalibur:~$ uname -a
SunOS excalibur 5.11 snv_89 i86pc i386 i86pc
ivan at excalibur:~$ echo ${.sh.version}
Version M 1993-12-28 s+
ivan at ciara:~$ uname -a
SunOS ciara 5.11 snv_106 i86pc i386 i86pc
ivan at ciara:~$ echo ${.sh.version}
Version M 93t 2008-11-04
ivan at ciara:~$ /usr/dt/bin/dtksh
$ echo ${.sh.version}
Version M-12/28/93d
Working around it is simple, just change $PATH again. But it had me
puzzled the other day when I ran into it. Is this is the way it's
supposed to behave, or is it a bug?
Ivan.
