Hi Philip,

On 23/07/2015 00:54, Philip Guenther wrote:
> This is the second time you've sent a patching adding a feature
> without saying *why* the feature should be added.  That's not very
> helpful.

Apologies.

> Your first patch for cat added a feature (-f option) to solve problem
> in NetBSD which had to be solved in a different way in OpenBSD.  As as
> result, we're not adding the -f option to OpenBSD.

The reason that patch was raised was not to fix issues in security(8) in
OpenBSD, I understood it as you came the realisation that you're
vulnerable to the same problem that the NetBSD folks were trying to fix
by adding -f to their cat(1).

> So, what's the story with the -l option?  What change/fix in OpenBSD
> base requires it?

Nothing requires it explicitly, more the question of if having the
ability for cat to set exclusive locks on its stdout so that multiple
calls to the same cat command will cause the the output to be arranged
in sequence is useful.

> (It's not portable, so any portable program should be doing this via a
> more powerful, portable tool, like perl, python, or C.)

Understood.


Sevan

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