Jim Meyering wrote: > Pádraig Brady wrote: > > Hi Pádraig, > >> 90% of the time I use cut, I want it to split on whitespace. > > Same here (though usually SP+TAB are all I care about). > That's why when I insist on using cut, I'd first filter the input > through e.g., tr -s '[[:blank:]]' ' ' > > Other times I might use awk, perl, or even ruby. > >> How about supporting: cut -d '[:space:]' > > Why? ;-)
Sorry, I was playing devil's advocate but was too terse. The advantage of cut -d '[:whatever:]' is that it would be trivial to implement and would save a data copy between tr and cut. Also if cutting a range of fields, one can maintain the original separators which might be desired. Also since this is the common case, it's slightly less syntax than tr .... | cut .... The other side of the argument is that this is new functionality, which is bad from a portability/documentation/learning standpoint. I'm 55:45 against adding cut -d '[:blank:]' cheers, Pádraig. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
