On the usage of ${FILE}

[Wesley Shields]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 12:38:01PM +0000, Chris Rees wrote:
> On 1 Mar 2012 11:26, "Matthew Seaman" <matthew at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Dear all,
> >
> > bsd.commands.mk has the following:
> >
> > FILE?=          /usr/bin/file
> >
> > which is unfortunate, given that ${FILE} is used in several thousand
> > ports, generally as a loop control variable for iterating through a list
> > of files. In fact, I can only find about 8 places where the file(1)
> > program is intended.
> >
> > This obvious conflict of meanings seems pretty undesirable to me.  Am I
> > missing something?  Is there any reason to keep the status quo rather
> > than changing the bsd.commands.mk variable to FILE_CMD and making the
> > corresponding changes in those 8 places?
> >
> >        Cheers,
> >
> >        Matthew
> >
> 
> I think that the loop control variables should be renamed to lower case.

Except more of them in uppercase are bound to be added in the future,
despite the best warnings not to do so.

-- WXS