Re: Any way to allow clobbering empty files when noclobber is set?

[Vin Shelton <acs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

IMO, there is little to no reason to complexify the code and add to the
users' cognitive burden by adding a new option.  That written, NO_CLOBBER
is a feature I don't use, so I'll contentedly end my part of this
conversation now.

  - Vin


On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 10:36 PM Daniel Shahaf <d.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Vin Shelton wrote on Wed, 03 Jun 2020 22:13 -0400:
> > What is the significance of a 0-length file as opposed to a file with
> > contents?
>
> There _are_ some cases where a 0-length file is treated differently to
> a non-existing one:
>
> - .vimrc
> - «cat foo» (also #include's in C)
> - GNU make(1)'s lookup order: GNUmakefile / Makefile / makefile
> - /etc/nologin
>
> > If we want to support this feature, why don't we change the meaning of
> > NO_CLOBBER to mean only non-empty files?
>
> Because users might be relying on the semantics that the documentation
> promises.
>
> For example, a user who does «echo foo > /etc/nologin» and doesn't get
> an error may infer that it's fine to delete the file once they finish
> whatever change they're working on.  Keeping the error would alert that
> user that they shouldn't remove the file when they're done (and, most
> likely, should pause to coordinate with whoever created /etc/nologin
> before them).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Daniel
>
>
> >   - Vin
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 8:05 AM Peter Stephenson <
> p.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Martin Tournoij wrote:
> > > > I switched from tcsh to zsh a while ago (many years too late, I
> know),
> > > > and found zsh can do pretty much everything better. There's one thing
> > > > I rather miss though: the 'notempty' option in 'noclobber'.
> > >
> > > This isn't actually hard to implement.  What does everyone else think?
> > >
> > > pws
> > >
>
>