cloc 1.68 warning: which: no abc in (..)

[foutrelis]

I'm seeing the following warning in cloc 1.68 which didn't occur with previous versions:

which: no abc in (/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/lib/jvm/default/bin:/usr/bin/site_perl:/usr/bin/vendor_perl:/usr/bin/core_perl)

Perl version shouldn't matter, but I'm using v5.22.2 on Arch Linux.

[AlDanial]

That's odd. The error is being triggered by line 133 where an attempt is made to see if SLOCCount is installed by way of its c_count command:

  133     $HAVE_SLOCCOUNT_c_count = external_utility_exists("echo 'abc' | c_count");

This works well enough on my Ubuntu 16.04 machine with and without c_count being installed. I'm wondering if Arch has a different implementation of c_count which accepts file names from STDIN, instead of lines of C code? (Also I'm wondering why I didn't just use the command which c_count to check for its existence ...)

What happens on your machine when you do

echo 'abc' | c_count

where abc does not correspond to a file name in your cwd?

You can delete the if statement at lines 132-134 to avoid the error. But of course I'd still like to understand and fix the issue for Arch Linux.

[foutrelis]

I'm seeing the same warning with the following Perl snippet:

my $exe = "echo 'abc' | c_count";
system "which" . " $exe" . ' >/dev/null 2>&1';

The command it's running is which echo 'abc' | c_count >/dev/null 2>&1.

Perhaps you have abc somewhere in your $PATH and it's obscuring the issue?

[AlDanial]

abc is neither in my $PATH nor a file in my cwd. Nevermind the Perl code, what does

echo 'abc' | c_count

show from your command line?

[foutrelis]

It shows bash: c_count: command not found.

Debian/Ubuntu seem to ship a custom implementation of which (as part of the debianutils package) whereas in Arch we package GNU which. This explains why you don't get any warnings printed to stderr when a program doesn't exist.

[AlDanial]

Thanks for the info. Can you suggest a mechanism to test for the existence of an executable that would work on Arch and Debian (and RHEL, etc)?

[AlDanial]

I installed VirtualBox on my Ubuntu system, created an Arch VM, and was able to duplicate the problem. So a fix should be forthcoming soon.

[AlDanial]

<oops, wrong button, didn't mean to close>

[AlDanial]

Not an obvious fix at all; the only way I could satisfy both Ubuntu and Arch was to test the output of c_count against some file--any file. I chose /bin/sh. At some point I expect to hear from owners of non-Windows systems saying they don't have a /bin/sh.

[relrod]

@AlDanial When might this fix be pushed into a bugfix release? Updating the Fedora packages -- should I patch around this issue for now, or can we expect a release soon?

[AlDanial]

I'll make a release (v1.70) with this fix July 1st. Won't be able to get to it sooner.

[AlDanial]

fyi, just released v1.70 which contains the fix