[tex-k] newer (feature request)

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Hi Olaf,
I do not know whether John Hobby's "newer" is such a holy cow as Knuth's
TeX, which never should be changed.  If not, I would be very happy if
the following extension could be implemented:

newer needs exactly two commandline args.

My idea is that it can get an arbitrary number of args, i.e.
 
	newer file_1 file_2 ... file_N

First of all, it should check whether file_N already exists.  Then it
should compare the timestamps for each file file_1 ... file_(N-1) with
that of file_N.

If the program is used as before (only 2 args), it behaves exactly the
same.  If more than two args appear on the commandline, it is much
more conveniant to use:

In a shell script you could write:

if newer *.tex file.dvi; then ...

instead of:

if newer file_1.tex file.dvi ||
   newer file_2.tex file.dvi ||
   newer file_3.tex file.dvi ||
   newer file_4.tex file.dvi ; then ...

Cheers,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			             Phone: +49-511-27060390
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