Add -s flag to which

In my work place we use many shellscripts written for BSD/Mac. They often use the which -s flag to check if a command is installed, such as which -s java || echo "You have to install java to run this program"

The -s flag is described on the FreeBSD man-page https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?which(1)

I would like the which -s command in shellscripts written for BSD to also work in Debian. This Merge request therefor adds the -s flag to the which command, to become compatible BSD/Mac shellscripts.

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approved this merge request

Highlight @clint for creating awareness of this merge request.

The MR does not break any thing. Helps those who are used to the -s flag. And even does

-	while getopts a whichopts
+	while getopts as whichopts

merged

mentioned in commit 8eaf8975

The silence was recieved as no objections, so merged.

resolved all threads

My objection was here: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/08/msg00149.html

Text from that URL

On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 01:45:05PM +0000, Clint Adams wrote:

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 10:55:41AM -0400, Boyuan Yang wrote:
> In theory any Debian Developers may merge, but the debianutils package is
> maintained by clint@ and srivasta@ so they are responsible for this package. I
> am adding them to the email receiver list explicitly.

Now that `command -v` is mandated by POSIX, it would make more
sense to transition `which` out of debianutils.

Hi Clint and Geert!

Clint: What you really cared about is not having "which" inside debianutils, and not whatever it has a -s(silent) flag or not? (I guess?)

So merging the -s flag, should not be a problem, but what you want is to have "which" moved away from debianutils, and into another (maybe optional) package? I guess that can be done?

Best regards -Erik

Den lör 5 juni 2021 kl 21:30 skrev Geert Stappers (@stappers) < gitlab@salsa.debian.org>:

Goal: coexist

I think we already agree on:

• command -v as POSIX says
• The nice to have -s flag for which

Thing currently unclear:

• Which Debian package should provide the which command.

What I can do is, after the release of Debian 11.0, slap a deprecation warning on which at the same time I remove tempfile from the package. If a new package or multiple packages supply a /usr/bin/which executable or alternatives, with or without an -s flag, then debianutils can declare a transitional dependency and drop its own which. If not, which can be dropped immediately after the release of Debian 12.0.

In https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/08/msg00236.html got this revived.

FYI

• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=992539 ITP packaging gnu-which
• http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/which/which/which.texi?revision=1.1&view=markup has no -s