jonny/dotfiles
Watch
1
0
Fork
You've already forked dotfiles
 0
Code Issues Pull requests Projects Releases Packages Wiki Activity Actions

Stop shadowing BSD coreutils with GNU versions on PATH

Browse source 
Prepending the coreutils/findutils/gnu-sed/grep gnubin dirs put GNU
stat, date, sed, grep and find on the PATH under their un-prefixed
names, which silently breaks any script written against the macOS
versions. Portable scripts typically probe BSD-first and fall back to
GNU, so the BSD probe succeeds against a GNU binary that means something
else entirely and the fallback never fires.

The Claude Code statusline was a live example: it reads a cache file's
mtime with `stat -f %m`, which GNU stat parses as a *filesystem* format
string. That emits a multi-line blob, the following arithmetic hits a
syntax error, and because an arithmetic error aborts the shell the
enclosing function returned early - so the git branch segment silently
vanished on every warm-cache render. Its `date -j -r` reset timestamps
failed the same way.

Homebrew installs the g-prefixed variants into $HOMEBREW_PREFIX/bin
regardless, so gstat / gdate / gsed / ggrep / gfind still give GNU
behaviour on demand. Note BSD sed needs `sed -i ''` rather than `sed -i`.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Jonny Barnes 2026-08-08 11:53:40 +01:00
commit 9930bbc009
No known key found for this signature in database
1 changed files with 5 additions and 5 deletions
Download patch file Download diff file Expand all files Collapse all files

10
zshrc.zsh
View file

@ -27,11 +27,11 @@ export GOPATH=$HOME/go
# Homebrew-managed tools
if (( ${+commands[brew]} )); then
# GNU functions - prepend so they override any system installed versions
export PATH="$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/opt/findutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/opt/grep/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"
# GNU functions are NOT put on the PATH under their un-prefixed names.
# Shadowing BSD stat/date/sed/grep silently breaks scripts that expect the
# macOS versions (portable scripts probe with `stat -f` / `date -j` first).
# Homebrew still installs the g-prefixed variants in $HOMEBREW_PREFIX/bin,
# so use gstat / gdate / gsed / ggrep / gfind when you want GNU behaviour.
# Homebrew cURL if we have it
test -d $HOMEBREW_PREFIX/opt/curl && export PATH="$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/opt/curl/bin:$PATH"