Re: pop - is there a more elegant solution

["Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 28, 10:01am, jarausch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
}
} is there a more elegant (less cryptic) solution to
} # emulate Perl's pop function

Depends on what you intend by emulating it.  Functions in Bourne-like
shell languages don't return values like functions in perl, so there
isn't anything well-defined to do with the popped value.

The fastest way to simply discard the last positional parameter is

    argv[-1]=()

(which of course only works in zsh).  So if what you want to do is to
store that positional parameter in $last and then discard it,

    last=$argv[-1]
    argv[-1]=()

is about as un-cryptic as you're going to get.

} #!/bin/zsh
} # get the last parameter and shorten the list
} echo $@
} last=$[-1]

You must mean $@[-1].  $[-1] is just -1.  But if you know about $@[-1],
then ...

} # shorten the parameter array
} set $@[0,$[-1+$#]]

... you should know that $@[1,-2] works as well.  (You don't index from
zero unless the ksh_arrays option is set.)

Aside to zsh-workers:  A weird thing about `setopt ksharrays' is that
${@[0]} is $1.  Does ksh really work that way?

-- 
Bart Schaefer                                 Brass Lantern Enterprises
http://www.well.com/user/barts              http://www.brasslantern.com

Zsh: http://www.zsh.org | PHPerl Project: http://phperl.sourceforge.net