Jan Skowron wrote: > coreutils program "cut" could use a "merge delimiters" option. > > Common use case: ls -l | cut ... > One needs to print 7-th column of ls -l to see all times of > modifications. But there is no constant number of delimiters between
If you are only interested in times, why not ask the tool for just that information, e.g. stat -c %y * > merge delimiters option would help a lot in such cases. Without it > users are forced to use "gawk" instead of "cut". And what's wrong with that? Or stated differently, awk is a standard and portable tool, whereas "new version of cut with new option that isn't yet present on many systems" isn't. Based on traffic on this list it seems there is still a large number of people using coreutils 5.x which is more than 2 years old at best. Any new option that gets added thus has this waiting period of a number of years before it can be reasonably assumed to be in common use. And even then, people that want to write portable scripts still can't use the option, because it won't be in other 'cut' implementations, such as Darwin's or Sun's or the BSD's, etc. In short: adding options to standard commands when a portable solution already exists does not make a lot of sense, and the coreutils maintainers are very resistant to doing it as a result. Brian _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
