Kent Karlsson wrote:
> > I'm not going into the implementation part; just pointing out that
> > this issue is not something an operating system can ignore.
>
> "cat" and "cp" can and shall ignore it. They are octet-level
> file operations, attaching no semantics to the octets. Try "iconv".
This byte-level operation is the just the default behavior. This basic
behavior should remain the default, of course.
However, there already are a lot of options specific to text files, that
*do* attach character semantics to octets, such as the "-n" option to number
output lines:
http://www.hmug.org/man/1/cat.html
As a minimum, option "-v" must know the semantics of NL and LF control
codes, of the digits, and the of white space.
There is no technical reason for not adding more options to act more
sensibly with the encoding(s) of the involved text file(s). Again, any such
text-specific option must be disabled by default, in order to preserve the
basic byte-by-byte operation.
_ Marco
