The "which" utility is not guaranteed to be installed either, and if it
is, its behavior is not portable either. This means that when various
programs are installed, the `which` check will report a fatal error
because the which tool did not exist and the shell returned a nonzero
status when attempting to fork+exec. If it did exist, it might not be an
implementation of `which` that returns nonzero when commands do not
exist.
The general scripting suggestion is to use the "command -v" shell
builtin; this is required to exist in all POSIX 2008 compliant shells,
and is thus guaranteed to work everywhere.
For some in-depth discussions on the topic, see:
- https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/081
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/85249/why-not-use-which-what-to-use-then/85250#85250
Examples of open-source shells likely to be installed as /bin/sh on
Linux, which implement the 15-year-old standard: ash, bash, busybox,
dash, ksh, mksh and zsh.
This commit updates documentation to no longer suggest a bad practice
that will confuse the reader when it doesn't work.
Change-Id: I0ed5ced353124919c7e09912c6d4d5aea146fa33
Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/160666
Tested-by: Ilmari Lauhakangas <ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org>
Reviewed-by: Ilmari Lauhakangas <ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org>
ceb885232a