On Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 05:56:07PM -0800, Denys Vlasenko wrote: > On Tuesday 09 March 2010 01:55, Harald Becker wrote: > > Hallo Rob! > > > > > Why do we have unnecessary leading whitespace? What happend to small and > > > simple and doing no more than absolutely necessary? > > > > As far as I remember the original (K&R) behavior of wc was always to > > produce leading whitespace (fixed format output). Only the newer > > versions of gnu wc striped of this leading whitespace. That lead to > > several shell script failures that had to be fixed during the last years. > > ... and now we have script failures because _new_ scripts expect _new_ > output format >>:( "Progress" sometimes looks like pointless churn.
True enough. But, there were two failures here: 1) Extraneous whitespace from wc, that *everybody* had to script around. 2) Failure to script defensively, so you didn't care how much whitespace. -- David N. Lombard, Intel, Irvine, CA I do not speak for Intel Corporation; all comments are strictly my own. _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list busybox@busybox.net http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
