Re: Feature suggestion: env --nopath

[Pádraig Brady]

On 23/11/2024 09:14, Simon Tatham wrote:
> Simon Tatham <anakin@pobox.com> wrote:
> > I think it would be useful if 'env' had an option which would cause it
> > to treat its COMMAND argument as _necessarily_ a pathname to an
> > executable file, rather than the usual semantics of considering it to be
> > either that or a command to search for on PATH.
>
> Rob Landley wrote:
> > When you care about that you do ./filename and the ./ is an explicit
> > path meaning "in the current directory".
>
> But the COMMAND might not _be_ in the current directory. The feature I'm
> suggesting would be usable if COMMAND is _either_ of a cwd-relative path
> _or_ an absolute path.
>
> Prefixing "./" makes a cwd-relative path work fine, as you say. But it
> causes an absolute path to _stop_ working. Consider the commands
>
>    env --nopath foo
>    env --nopath bar/foo
>    env --nopath /opt/quux/bin/foo
>
> If one replaces the nonexistent "env --nopath" with a prefix "./" as you
> suggest, then we get
>
>    ./foo
>    ./bar/foo
>    .//opt/quux/bin/foo

All these boil down to you want to pass the actual path
rather than lookup a name in $PATH.
This can be achieved simply with: env $(realpath -ms "$path")

cheers,
Pádraig.