Hi Laslo, > > These tools are not standardized, but these flags are supported in all > > implementations I'm aware of (coreutils, busybox), and are > > occasionally used in scripts. > > > > These flags are only meaningful on operating systems which > > differentiate between text and binary files, so just ignore them. > > I would print something on stderr. POSIX is ignored often enough and a > ton of scripts are using the cancerous GNU extensions and other > extensions. If we just "ignore" them, there is no learning effect or > push for change for script writers, so maybe we could add a warning > while we ignore them, so when you run a script that makes use of these > mostly useless flags (which we could also tell them), then this might a > push in a good direction. What do you think?
I agree in that silently ignoring commands from the user is bad, as it breaks expectations. Though as noted in this case, those are not standardized (maybe that wasn't a great idea to add them in sbase instead of ubase even if they can be implemented in a portable manner), so anything can happen there. I'm not sure we should start adding those kind of half-compability parsing with coreutils, where do we stop? Also for what it's worth: $ busybox md5sum -b md5sum.c md5sum: unrecognized option: b BusyBox v1.31.1 (2019-11-29 10:55:12 UTC) multi-call binary. Usage: md5sum [FILE]... $ busybox md5sum -t md5sum.c md5sum: unrecognized option: t BusyBox v1.31.1 (2019-11-29 10:55:12 UTC) multi-call binary. Usage: md5sum [FILE]...
