On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 11:44, Paul Eggert wrote: > Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > a POSIX-conforming "head" program may > > support a "-1" option. It may also support a > > "-2" option, and so on. > > That violates POSIX Utility Syntax Guidelines 3 and 11. See: > > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/basedefs/xbd_chap12.html#tag_12_02
Well, so does the --lines option. I think "violates" is too strong of a word for anything called "Guidelines", but anyway... Guideline 11 isn't even a problem at all, unless you artificially make it a problem. It's only number 3 that is of concern. (see "--lines" though) You missed this bit at the bottom of the page: "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. Please fix. You wouldn't violate anything, and anyway, GNU's Not UNIX. :-) > Most likely the underlying problem is that your distribution has > decided to set _POSIX2_VERSION to 200112 in <unistd.h>. This > indicates that the distribution's maintainers want conformance to > POSIX 1003.1-2001 as specified above. To get the older behavior that > you prefer, you can set _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment, or > build coreutils with "configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209". Well, of course. Nearly everybody wants conformance. We also want, to the maximum extent possible, all of the historical behavior. You have to kill the historical behavior when, and only when, it is in direct conflict with the standard. So if the standard defined a "-2" option that would print the output twice, then yeah, you'd have to do that. Standards conformance comes first, generally. (you could still support "-3", but that's silly) _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
