On 09/04/2013 10:14 AM, Pascal wrote: > Hi, > > > cat - "concatenate files and print on the standard output" - offers -s option > to suppress repeated empty lines. > > However, an "empty" line (visual perspective) that behave only spaces or tabs > is not considered as empty : one option -S that would address this scenario > should be added to cat... > > I hope to be clear :-)
While it's a fair suggestion, I'd be against adding this functionality to cat as it's outside of its core functionality. Now even `cat -s` is debatable, but at least that is also implemented in FreeBSD and is an awkward enough operation to do in sed for example: http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/cat-_002ds.html However a simple additional sed operation would suffice to implement -S. Something like: sed 's/^ *$//' | cat -s So I'd be 70:30 against implementing this. thanks, Pádraig.
