env.sh: prefer readlink to cd && echo ${PWD}

[dancrossnyc]

A trivial change to make this script more robust for those of us who alias cd to something.

[jclulow]

Perhaps just use builtin cd to avoid alias expansion?

[dancrossnyc]

Perhaps just use builtin cd to avoid alias expansion?

I considered that, as well as using the chdir builtin, that's unlikely to be aliased. But I couldn't really see an advantage over readlink, which seems to be readily available pretty much everywhere. What's the advantage?

[jclulow]

It requires a fork, and it depends on GNU coreutils I believe; we don't have a readlink in the base tools.

In this case I suppose it doesn't matter hugely, but the pattern used here is one we use in a lot of bash scripts all over the place -- so as long as we don't start changing all the other ones.

[dancrossnyc]

The forks are the same (the subcommand for $() is already run in a child process, of course), but it does add an exec. Yeah, I wondered about the coreutils thing.