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Re: Coreutils head and tail problems
On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> These are deliberate and will not change. GCC has to maintain
> backward compatibility with platforms which do not support head -n1,
> tail -n1, etc ... the issues you have found are merely the tip of the
> iceberg.
That simply means that replacement must be with more portable alternatives
such as "sed q" (as used in Paul Eggert's patch
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-bugs/2002-02/msg00516.html> to replace "head
-1"). Though some cases might not have portable alteratives (include our
own cut down implementation to be build for the build system?).
> Coreutils MUST continue to support the command line syntaxes that were
> removed from POSIX.1-2001, for at least the next five years. Ten
> years would be better. Forever would be better still. And "support"
> means "silently accept, regardless of environment variable or
> compile-time settings."
But I agree that dropping support for these options, absent
POSIXLY_CORRECT being set in the environment which GNU software would
traditionally have used for such a purpose, is ridiculously premature.
--
Joseph S. Myers
jsm@polyomino.org.uk