Re: why is the - modifier useful

Martijn Dekker <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.shells.zsh.devel,gmane.comp.shells.zsh.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Op 01-07-2025 om 10:52 schreef Peter Stephenson:
> On 01/07/2025 09:26 BST Marc Chantreux <[email protected]> wrote:
>> then I realize this custom came for reason: - is already a
>> builtin which seems really useless to me:
> 
> It's not very useful.  The convention used to be any command starting
> with a "-" was a login shell, so you could start up your own command and
> anything that cared would notice.  I'm not aware of anything that still
> cares.

All the POSIXy shells care to this day, zsh included. So does tcsh.

E.g., the zsh command

   - bash

starts bash as a login shell by prepending a - to $0. This makes bash execute 
different profile scripts and makes the 'logout' command available.

-- 
||	modernish -- harness the shell
||	https://github.com/modernish/modernish
||
||	KornShell lives!
||	https://github.com/ksh93/ksh
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.