Re: cksum RFE

[James Youngman]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 08:36:51PM -0700, Dave Yost wrote:
> There should be options a la wc to select which of the three columns 
> of output you want, the sum, the size, and/or the name.
> 
> cksum --sum
> 
> is what you want when you're using it in a script.  Otherwise you 
> have to mess with the output to extract just the sum.

Well, you're already processing the output if you have a script.  It's
not really the Unix way to wantonly add extra options to commands when
it's so simple just to parse the output as-is:

set x $(cksum < /bin/sh)
sum=$2
blocks=$3

... and there are probably at least another six ways to do it in the
shell.  This is the whole point of the "almost everything is a text
file really" concept.

Regards,
James.