Hi Chet,
Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> writes:
>> On Sun, 24 Aug 2025 at 16:59, G. Branden Robinson <
>> g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I decline to address how Chet maintains plain text files in
>>> his distribution.
>>>
>> Well that just side-steps basically everything that triggered me to
>> write
>> about this in the first place. It is exactly "plain text files" that I find
>> particularly vexing.
>
> This seems to be your own particularly maddening itch. Are you arguing that
> using `word' reduces readability in general? Does anyone besides you think so?
The `...' convention is perfectly readable to me. But I do prefer the
way coreutils and others do things:
$ LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 ./src/cksum --base64 -a sha3 --length abc /dev/null
cksum: invalid length: ‘abc’
$ LC_ALL=C ./src/cksum --base64 -a sha3 --length abc /dev/null
cksum: invalid length: 'abc'
However, this feature requires a lot of work in Gnulib to portable get
the current locale's charset and handle quoting depending on that [1]
[2]. I would not blame you if you do not want to implement it yourself,
and even converting the existing code to use the Gnulib quote module is
a chore [3].
Collin
[1] https://github.com/coreutils/gnulib/blob/master/lib/quotearg.c
[2] https://github.com/coreutils/gnulib/blob/master/lib/localcharset.c
[3] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Quoting.html
