On 2026-07-08 01:02, Borden wrote:
tr's man page is very similar to what I proposed.
Yes, but tr does not use regular expressions so its man page can't delegate to regexp(7) as easily as grep's can.
What a pain, huh? Sometimes I wish I could go back to Bell Labs circa 1975 and whisper into the Unix developers' ears, "Simplify the utilities' API!" Alas, by the time I visited four years later, it was too late: they'd already published, too many people were using their work, and its features were, though not set in stone, already ossifying.
