> Jeremie Courreges-Anglas said: > > To repeat myself, the addition of this rather silly option is supposed > > to reduce differences from other implementations so that we can stop > > wasting time about it. > > There is a big difference between providing a switch for compatibility > and following specific behavior resulting from outright stupid use of > utility. There is a limit even to compatibility effort - we aren't > going to implement GNU coreutils' long options, right? > > In this particular case trying to pick between "-n" and "-c" flags is > just wrong: you can't want both X lines and Y bytes at the same time. > If your script does this, you should fix the script. If port's script > does it, fix it and upstream the fix. We are already doing that for > similar bugs.
One could argue the existance of various systems which handle this differently... Helps find such misuses... And keeps scripts portable, so that systems which handle this differently don't get burned. So the question becomes: What is the PURE BENEFIT of being purist here, relative to the possibilty of breaking a script used in other systems? The argument is a lot like putting #!/bin/bash at the top of scripts.
