Re: [patch] Add numerical suffixes to split

[Paul Eggert]

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:

> However, if you can find a few other people who say
> they'd like that functionality and make a good case
> for it, I'll reconsider.

If you go that route, I'd suggest adding an option 
--suffix-alphabet=STRING, so that the user can specify
an arbitrary alphabet to use when generating the suffix.
The default STRING would be abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, as now.

The current split.c is not portable to EBCDIC hosts, since it assumes
that 'a' + 1 == 'b', 'b' + 1 == 'c', etc., and this is not true of
EBCDIC hosts.  Adding support for --suffix-alphabet should fix this
bug as a side effect.

One complication would be multibyte characters in STRING, though.


Also, a question for Jesse: would "csplit" work for your particular
application?  It can generate numeric suffixes already.