Re: Adding numerical suffixes to split

[Paul Eggert]

"Jesse Kornblum" <address@hidden> writes:

> 2. The files we are working with will become evidence to be used in
> criminal proscecutions.

If I were a criminal defense lawyer attacking your use of 'split' on
technical grounds, I'd ask why you require a particular implementation
of 'split' with nonstandard extensions.

I'd have a harder time attacking your methods if they could be
executed on any implementation of 'split' conforming to the standard
specification for 'split'
<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/split.html>
(this is ISO/IEC 9945:2002, a formal international standard).  If your
procedures stick to the formal standard, anybody can check your work
by running your procedures on any standard implementation (Solaris or
Tru64, say).  This would provide an extra check that the prosecution
isn't incorrectly relying on some bug in the coreutils implementation
of 'split'.


> The more commands that need to be executed, the greater the
> possibility that a mistake will be made

True, but the number of commands that you'd have to put into a script
ought to be significantly less than the number of lines of code in
'split' that you'd have to change.

Also, you ought to have a script anyway -- since 'split' alone doesn't
solve your problem, and since your users are not experts -- so it
shouldn't be a major objection that you use a script.


> Given that the functionality for numerical suffixies already exists
> in csplit, why can't that be added to regular split? Wouldn't this
> be a trivial operation?

This issue is really up to the coreutils maintainer, but if you supply
a high-quality patch with a ChangeLog entry, I think you'll have a
better chance of it getting accepted.  Please see
<http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-07/msg00000.html>
for an example of what a patch should look like.  Also, I suggest that
you ponder the suggestions and comments in
<http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-07/msg00001.html>.