In article <[email protected]>, Hyman Rosen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote: > > Does it actually fail to work? What happens instead? > > Yes, it actually "fails" to work. Given these inputs > > File "a": File "b": > 2 a 1 a > 10 b 10 b > > the command "join a b" produces no output. The OP would > like "join" to take the same commands to specify the sort > order of the join column that the "sort" command takes in > order to sort columns, rather than requiring the join > column to be sorted in lexical order. I think the answer to his general question, then, is that it would take an enormous amount of work to get all commands to be consistent this way. There are lots of commands that work on similar kinds of data, and they each have options that are specific to what they do, as well as some options that are more general. Reconciling all of these, including dealing with some of the conflicts (especially with traditional single-letter options) would be a huge undertaking. Traditionally, the Unix model has been to NOT try to replicate all these options in every command. The Unix Way is to have a toolkit of specialized commands, which can be combined to produce the results you want. So if you have two files that are sorted numerically, and want to join them, you first run them through sort(1) to re-sort them lexicographically, then run those through join, and finally sort the result numerically. In some cases, certain combinations have become so common that developers have relented and added features to one of the commands. For instance, tar is used so often with compressed and gzipped archives that they decided to add -Z and -z options to GNU tar (this is especially useful in combination with GNU tar's ability to write to remote servers via rsh/ssh -- this is complicated to do using CLI pipes). I guess there haven't been enough users running into this issue with join that anyone felt the need to give it all of sort's capabilities. -- Barry Margolin, [email protected] Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** *** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group *** _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
