ari <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] said this stuff: > > > After 10 years of being merely `obsolescent', head -N has finally > > been officially declared to be `obsolete'. > > I have yet to see a pointer to where the historic usage has been > declared "obsolete", outside of personal declarations that it has been > "officially declared obsolete" elsewhere.
"head -10" was marked as obsolescent in the 1992 edition of the POSIX standard, and POSIX withdrew the requirement to support "head -10" in the 2001 edition of the standard. If you don't think that makes "head -10" obsolete then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about what the word "obsolete" means. People can reasonably disagree about whether it was wise for POSIX to make "head -10" obsolete, and about whether it was wise of coreutils to give the coreutils installer and/or the user the ability to disable support for "head -10". But those are different issues. There's no real dispute that "head -10" is obsolete. If this really bugs you, then the proper way to change things back to the way they used to be is to change POSIX. You can start this process by filing a defect report with the Austin Common Standards Revision Group; see <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/>. Features become obsolete all the time in the GNU world. For example, GCC 3.3 removed support for unescaped newlines in C strings. This broke a few programs, but it's not really a big deal in the overall scheme of things, and there are some real advantages to sticking with the standard usage. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
