illumos gate

bustos 2006-04-28

The dominant use of svcprop is to retrieve the value of a property from
the repository and assign it to a shell variable. svcprop's quoting
rules make this quite complicated. svcprop uses those rules because
properties may have multiple values or no values. Usually, the calling
script should consider such a case to be an error, but detecting this in
the shell is also complicated, sufficiently so that most script authors
simply omit it. svcprop could greatly simplify this use case with
options like

-1         Can only be used with arguments which specify
                a single property.  If the property has a single
                value, then it is printed, without quotation.  If
                the property has no values or multiple values,
                then svcprop will print nothing and exit with
                status 3.

-T type    Can only be used with arguments which specify
                a single property.  If the specified property has
                a type other than type or a subtype of type,
                svcprop will print nothing and exit with status 4.