Re: Fw: Two split suggestions

[Jim Meyering]

"George" <address@hidden> wrote:
> First off, I am not sure my first message made it to any where.

It did.

...
> I have two suggestions for split:
> 1) numeric suffix: I noticed that a numeric suffix options was purposed:
> http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-08/msg00020.html
> Perhaps a better way to specify this would be to use -e (extension) options, 
> where for example:
> -e n3
> would mean to use a 3 digit numeric extension. As well as:
> -e c3
> would mean to use a 3 digit alpha extension.
> The default would be to use the current 2 digit alpha extension.

This has been implemented recently:

* Major changes in release 5.0.91:
** New features
  ...
  split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.

> 2) stdout output: Provide an option that causes split to output to stdout, so 
> that it can be used in pipe commands.  This feature would be useful so that 
> the complete set of output files would not have to be generated before they 
> can be processed.  This feature becomes more important as the input file 
> becomes very large, because the very large storage requirements could be 
> avoided.  Perhaps an option '-o1' could be used to signify that it's output 
> would be sent to stdout.

I don't see how this would be useful, since for any nontrivial
operation, split's output must go to separate files.