On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Ted Unangst <[email protected]> wrote: > Turns out we have an -o option, but it doesn't do what most people > expect. That's a problem with nonstandard options, and we were probably > lax in asserting that we really wanted these options when importing. > oops.
(especially because -o can be emulated by adding /dev/null as a file argument...) Let's think about what you're proposing: "we added -o as an extension, but now we want a *different* -o, so let's shuffle the extensions (breaking anything using them) so that people can depend on a different extension" This doesn't make sense to me. If people want to write a portable script, they should USE PORTABLE OPTIONS. If they want to sign away their brain to GNU grep, they should INSTALL GNU GREP. Just swapping between non-portable extensions *reduces* portability (by breaking portability between versions of OpenBSD) instead of increasing it. > Anyway, the GNU -o option seems a lot more useful than ours. They call > this option -H, and have no equivalent to our -H (which also seems pretty > useless). Our current -H option belongs together with the -R and -P options, giving consistency across the utility set for control of recursion. ...except that that the option for always following symlinks is normally -L but in grep it's -S because -L was already taken by a different extension! > This diff switches over to only printing the part of the line that > matched, not the whole line, possibly repeating the pattern if the line > matches twice (that's the tricky part with our code, as is). The tangly > gotos can be cleaned up, but I figured I should just toss this out there. I'm opposed to this. Sorry, Ted. Philip Guenther
