Eric Blake wrote: > According to Roger McNichols on 9/11/2009 6:51 PM: >> Currently using version 5.2.1 of coreutils 'split' command produces files >> with 'intelligent' suffixes. That is, the number of letters (or digits) >> required >> is based on the known number of output files that will be required. > > coreutils 5.2.1 is quite old; the latest stable version is 7.6. > > Thanks for the report. That said, POSIX requires that split stop > processing input and give an error after suffixes have been exhausted, > rather than using longer suffixes: > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/split.html
That goes against the GNU "no limits" policy though. How about we fail only if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set or if the suffix len is specified and is too small. Otherwise we use the zzaa, zzab method as described before. > But at least there is the -n option to specify a larger suffix. right, -a. As an aside, I just noticed FreeBSD has -n to specify the number of chunks rather than the size. That's a very useful feature that was already on my TODO list. > If you are still worried about running out of suffixes, then it would > probably be worth implementing a command line option that allows split to > use intelligent suffixes; we can't make it the default because of POSIX, > but we can at least provide it via a new option. Would you like to submit > the patch? Do you mean select the appropriate suffix length based on size, or do you mean the zzaa, zzab scheme? The former wouldn't help when processing a pipe for example so I'd probably stick with the latter method for consistency. cheers, Pádraig.
