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Re: Coreutils head and tail problems
- From: "Zack Weinberg" <zack at codesourcery dot com>
- To: "Andrew Walrond" <andrew at walrond dot org>
- Cc: <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 08:58:13 -0700
- Subject: Re: Coreutils head and tail problems
- References: <034301c36bce$3ff63180$0101000a@office>
"Andrew Walrond" <andrew@walrond.org> writes:
> As I'm sure you know, head -1, tail -1 have been deprecated in favour of
> head -n1 and tail -n1 in recent gnu coreutils, and indeed no longer works in
> the latest releases.
>
> But, a quick grep of 3.3.1 or mainline sources shows lots of instances of
> the old usage:
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.
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."
Please take this up with the coreutils maintainers.
zw