[inkyoto]

> 'which' is ensconced as standard practice in many shell scripts

Ugh. Now that the UNIX universe has collapsed unto Linux, BSD's and very, very few other *X's, it is less of an issue, but «which», due to it having never been enshrined in standards, has never been safe to use in shell scripts, and an invocation could yield a suprise for the unprepared. At least on Solaris (if I am not mistaken), the «which» output yields *two* lines, of which the first is useless (along the lines of «ohiyo, lookie at what I have found») and with the second being the actual path to the binary. So «which» has never been truly portable and safe to use.

[kbenson]

I agree! Nothing I said was really to do with how scripts should be written, it's about how they are and how they have been written for decades at this point. People would be better served by not using which, and using something portable.

None of that helps this specific situation at all, which seems to have been poorly thought out in that it had the possibility of negatively affect many people, and not just the developers/admins who write scripts, but those that use what other people have written.

It's important to strive for chance for the better, but it's also important to see the world for how it actually is and what happens if that change happens all at once, which can (hopefully temporarily) be worse than what came before.