On Thu, 13 Mar 2008, Ned Freed wrote:
...
There is a "host" item listed, which is the FQDN of the local host. It
seems to me that one might want to know the host-only part of that
string. One could obtain it in a round-about way by using the "domain"
environment item and the "host" item; but is it worth adding
"host-only" ?
Frankly, I think the use of shortform names is a bad thing that should
be discouraged whenever possible. (IT uses them extensively here at Sun
and they cause no end of problems.) I'm therefore very reluctant to add
such an item.
I agree. Unqualified hostnames should never appear in protocols and,
IMHO, are only useful in space-constrained interactive environments, where
the user can obtain the full form if they have any doubt.
...
First of all, the specification says that any test against an unknown
item must fail unconditionally. This provides a simple way to check and
see if a given item is available:
if environment :matches "item" {...}
There's a pattern missing there. Regardless, the empty substring test is
probably more efficient:
if environment :contains "item" "" { ... }
Philip Guenther