Hi Ted, Ted Unangst wrote on Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 05:26:40PM -0400: > Ingo Schwarze wrote: >> Philip Guenther wrote:
>>> Standardese: POSIX doesn't specify that they are exclusive options >> It does: >> >> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html >> >> section 12.1, clause 8 > That also says: > > The use of conflicting mutually-exclusive arguments produces undefined > results, unless a utility description specifies otherwise. > > In that paragraph, "application" refers to the thing invoking the utility. So > a conforming script/user/etc is prohibited from calling grep -E -F. Oops. Studying that again, i come to the conclusion that you are right. So we are not required to change it. - in favour of change: erroring out is a bit less error prone - against change: not erroring out is potentially more useful because it allows overriding when playing with aliases and with concatenation of option lists - in favour of change: but the above games are dangerous and can trap people with non-portable behaviour - against change: every change risks breaking people's scripts - against change: other implementations differ from each other, so we would just trade one portability issue for another So, no clear argument either way, which probably means that it should be left alone... Sorry for my confusion, Ingo
