My apologies if this email address is for bugs only. This is a feature request (but I feel that the lack of the feature approaches bug status).
Request: uniq should have an option so it create tab delimited output instead of space delimited. Rationale: The coreutils are often piped together. In the following example, foo.txt is a tab delimited file: cut -f 1,2 foo.txt | sort -k 2,2 | uniq -c > bar.txt A subsequent sort or join operation on bar.txt may not pick up on fields correctly, if the fields in foo.txt contain spaces. I can specify the field separator for sort or join to remove the ambiguity, but this only works if the delimiter is consistent. uniq -c introduces an inconsistency because it creates space delimted output. This is an inconsistency unique to uniq -c among the coreutils. No other coreutil that I've used, including uniq without the "-c", have this behavior. This special case behavior often trips me up, and I suspect it does so for other users as well. I find myself writing shims to turn uniq -c output into tab delimited output just to make uniq work with other coreutils (sort, join, cut). It seems that this would be better handled if uniq had a flag to specify the column separator on a uniq -c Perhaps something like sort's -t flag, except used to specify the output seperator. --Pat _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
