On 12/18/2014 09:38 PM, enh wrote:
> This basically brings the catv code into cat (but optionally enabled,
> like the 'big' variant of sort) and adds the missing-from-both -n
> option. There are a couple of options in coreutils cat still missing,
> and a few more still in BSD's cat, but they're pretty useless.

Do you have an actual use case for these?

I'm curious because when I did catv as a separate command in busybox in
2006, I did so waiting for somebody to actually complain that it broke a
script. Technically, I'm still waiting, although I don't follow the
busybox list quite so closely these days.

Posix only defined the -u option, and LSB is so _awesomely_ craptacular
a standard that not only do they not mention "cat" at all, but they
deprecated "ar" (presumably because of Ulrich Dr. Pepper's personal
dislike of static linking).

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/cat.html

http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/cmdbehav.html

In implementing catv, I was really responding to original bell labs unix
developer Rob Pike's 1983 usenix paper telling the BSD guys they were
full of it (popularly called "cat -v considered harmful"):

http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf

(I saw
http://www.all-things-android.com/content/pros-and-cons-busybox-android
but he wasn't actually using it for anything either.)

Again, the above is not a "no", just a request for more information. If
we already implement catv, then having it available in cat (via config
option) isn't a big stretch.  I'm just curious what use case finally
actually needed it after 8 years...

Rob
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