On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Bob Proulx <[email protected]> wrote: > I thought I would say a few words in defense of POSIX. Why is it this > way? Because the that was the way the command was originally written > to work. There are a zillion small behaviors like this from when > people wrote a tool (mkdir, mv, cp, etc.) each of the different times > any of the tools were written. Every time someone wrote a new version > of one of the Unix utilities (because the original was closed and > proprietary) then it would have its own different quirks. This led to > every Unix-like system being different from each other in the zillion > different ways. The classic case being SysV versus BSD but now that > would include GNU too. It was very hard to write a script that would > run the same on different systems. > > The purpose of POSIX was to say enough was enough. Stop the > proliferation of differences. Document the existing behavior and > standardize upon it so that scripts could be written portably. As > long as they only used the standard behavior then they could count on > being able to operate the same on every standard platform. > > And so we have things like mkdir. It conforms to the standard because > that is a good thing. The standard says what it says because > originally it documented the existing behavior of the then current > systems. And this is good because the alternative of having divergent > behavior everywhere is worse.
Thank you for your words. I get it. It's kind of harder to suggest modifications to a standard though. What is the correct path on suggesting something that is clearly better; at least from my POV? -- It's hard to be free... but I love to struggle. Love isn't asked for; it's just given. Respect isn't asked for; it's earned! Renich Bon Ciric http://www.woralelandia.com/ http://www.introbella.com/
