On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Dean Brooks wrote:
> Sounds good to me... I also imagine it results in a lot less coding
> than the other method.
Damn. You noticed. :-)
> The only caveat would be that the extract will have to deal with the
> possible scenario of the file not existing or not being accessible.
>
> Would that condition cause the ${stat:} expansion to fail or to simply
> return an empty string?
Hadn't thought it through. Perhaps this needs to be a conditional think
like ${if that has yes/no substrings.
> It may be preferrable to have empty string rather than fail, as
> non-existing files may be "normal". The extract item could be
> used to force a fail if the key wasn't found anyway, right?
Yes, that's certainly true. Maybe just returning an empty string is
sufficient after all.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
