Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Well, so does the --lines option.
No, that uses an allowed extension. It's not prohibited, the way that multi-digit options are prohibited. > I think "violates" is too strong of a word for > anything called "Guidelines", but anyway... The standard says: The utilities in the Shell and Utilities volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 that claim conformance to these guidelines shall conform completely to these guidelines as if these guidelines contained the term "shall" instead of "should". So it's a hard requirement for (most) standard utilities. > Guideline 11 isn't even a problem at all, unless you > artificially make it a problem. Sure it is. It says that order shouldn't matter unless the options are mutually exclusive and one is documented to override the other. Hence if options like "-1" are and "-3" are allowed, then "-13" must be equivalent to "-1 -3" which in turn should be equivalent to "-3 -1" or "-31". I suspect that this problem is part of the reason that multi-digit options were disallowed. > "On some implementations, the utilities accept > usage in violation of these guidelines for > backwards-compatibility as well as accepting > the required form." > > Well, there you go. The POSIX and UNIX standard > explicitly allows for the traditional behavior. That is a warning that some implementations don't conform to the standard. It's certainly not a license to do whatever you want to do, and then still claim conformance. > Nearly everybody wants conformance. If nearly everybody wanted conformance, it wouldn't be much of a problem (since almost nobody would be using nonstandard commands like "tail -10" :-). But at any rate it's easy to configure this, both at build-time and at run-time. If your coreutils installation isn't configured the way you like, just change it. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
