Re: cat -v
On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Nick Guenther wrote: Why does cat retain the -[etv], -[bn] and -[s] options? I am reading the paper cited in cat's manpage and saw 'vis' mentioned. vis is in base, and line numbering and stripping can be done with sed, so why does cat have those options? Is for history, just for compatibility, or has no one ever bothered to remove them (I find this unlikely)? Once you've added a flag to a command it's almost impossible to remove it for compatibility reasons. -Otto
Re: cat -v
Nick Guenther [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: ... Anyway, I wasn't trying to fight about it, I'm just curious. ... sed -n l has been around since forever or at least since v7. Presumably before that folks used ed or od. cat -v -e etc. have been around in *bsd since at least 4.1bsd. I don't remember ATT picking up on those options, but probably -v, -e, etc., are part of various standards today. Certainly the FSF folks picked up on those flags in their GNU core utilities. The vis command appears to have been added in 4.4bsd. I can't find any evidence of vis outside of 4.4bsd. Most people who've been around Unix long enough have their own pet commands. For instance, I have randomize, fd, and genpass. I use randomize all the time to unsort data line by line differently each time, fd in place of od -xc to get side-by-side hex ascii dump output, and more rarely genpass to generate random passwords for things. There's very probably some population of other people out there who might find those very commands useful, - but it's also very probable there's not a large enough population of such users that I could find them without annoying a bunch of other people in the process. -Marcus Watts
Re: cat -v
On 28/07/06, Marcus Watts [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nick Guenther [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: ... Anyway, I wasn't trying to fight about it, I'm just curious. ... sed -n l has been around since forever or at least since v7. Presumably before that folks used ed or od. cat -v -e etc. have been around in *bsd since at least 4.1bsd. I don't remember ATT picking up on those options, but probably -v, -e, etc., are part of various standards today. Certainly the FSF folks picked up on those flags in their GNU core utilities. The only standard (SUSv3) switch for the cat utility is -u for unbuffered output. The -e, -t, -v, -s, and -n switches are mentioned in the rationale, and the reason for not having them in the standard is that the same functionality may be found in other utilities (giving examples using sed(1) and pr(1)). http://www.unix.org/online.html Regards, Andreas -- Andreas Kahari Somewhere in the general Cambridge area, UK
Re: cat -v
On 7/28/06, Otto Moerbeek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Nick Guenther wrote: Why does cat retain the -[etv], -[bn] and -[s] options? Once you've added a flag to a command it's almost impossible to remove it for compatibility reasons. Thanks Otto. That's what I figured but I was thinking that the OpenBSD philosophy would trump compatibility. -Nick
Re: cat -v
Nick Guenther [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:31:10 -0400 From: Nick Guenther [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: OpenBSD-Misc misc@openbsd.org Subject: cat -v Why does cat retain the -[etv], -[bn] and -[s] options? I am reading the paper cited in cat's manpage and saw 'vis' mentioned. vis is in base, and line numbering and stripping can be done with sed, so why does cat have those options? Is for history, just for compatibility, or has no one ever bothered to remove them (I find this unlikely)? -Nick Using the same argument, everything that grep, sed and awk can do can be done in perl, so why have grep, sed awk? All we need to do is teach everybody to type perl -pe 1 in place of cat. -Marcus Watts
Re: cat -v
On 7/27/06, Marcus Watts [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nick Guenther [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:31:10 -0400 From: Nick Guenther [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: OpenBSD-Misc misc@openbsd.org Subject: cat -v Why does cat retain the -[etv], -[bn] and -[s] options? I am reading the paper cited in cat's manpage and saw 'vis' mentioned. vis is in base, and line numbering and stripping can be done with sed, so why does cat have those options? Is for history, just for compatibility, or has no one ever bothered to remove them (I find this unlikely)? -Nick Using the same argument, everything that grep, sed and awk can do can be done in perl, so why have grep, sed awk? I have been wondering that too somewhat, but I assume it is because they have different uses and they are easier to use than doing a perl script every time. All we need to do is teach everybody to type perl -pe 1 in place of cat. That's not the same as what I was asking. perl -pe 1 is more complex (in typing and implementation) than cat, wheras cat -v is more complex than vis. Anyway, I wasn't trying to fight about it, I'm just curious. -Nick
Re: cat -v
On Thu, 27 Jul 2006 23:58:49 -0400, Nick Guenther [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Why does cat retain the -[etv], -[bn] and -[s] options? I am reading the paper cited in cat's manpage and saw 'vis' mentioned. vis is in base, and line numbering and stripping can be done with sed, so why does cat have those options? Is for history, just for compatibility, or has no one ever bothered to remove them (I find this unlikely)? -Nick Using the same argument, everything that grep, sed and awk can do can be done in perl, so why have grep, sed awk? I have been wondering that too somewhat, but I assume it is because they have different uses and they are easier to use than doing a perl script every time. All we need to do is teach everybody to type perl -pe 1 in place of cat. That's not the same as what I was asking. perl -pe 1 is more complex (in typing and implementation) than cat, wheras cat -v is more complex than vis. Anyway, I wasn't trying to fight about it, I'm just curious. You haven't heard the term Creeping featurism? It is the desire of UNIX hackers to add every functionality to a command until you can even send mail with it. The -exec option to find is the most classic example of this. With that option, using find, you can do 'anything'. :-) Up to and including rebooting... -- Eric Furman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
