> What it sounds like to me, is that you're suggesting that rather than > utilities automatically use a particular field separator, they should > use white space (of some kind) unless they're told to use another > character.
Which (again) doesn't work if you need to have empty fields, which is quite common (and no, we must not corrupt data by changing empty values to another token). > This falls in line with the behaviour of tools like awk, cut, etc. All of those commands allow a field separator to be specified. I stand by the original proposal (modulo whether the field separator should be : or |). -- meem
