/bin/date and coreutils

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2007-05-07 12:13:43 -0700, David Liontooth wrote:
> sorry for thinking it was so unlikely this was ported that I didn't even
> look! I'll be interested to see what's included.
> 
> This is very cool, as it allows my scripts to be crossplatform.

But you need to use the with_default_names variant *and* have
$prefix/bin in your path first, because gdate doesn't exist under
Linux. If your scripts run in background, there's some risk of
race condition when coreutils is upgraded (because the old version
is deactivated before the new one is activated). And you never
know if there will be changes under Linux (for instance, coreutils
provides a "hostname" command, but Linux currently uses another
one). For all these reasons (and the fact that the output of the
shell commands depends on the locales), I think that it is a better
idea to use Perl instead of shell scripts if you want portable
scripts.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)