Re: feature request: zero-terminated lines for comm

[James Youngman]

On 9/10/07, John Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:
> James Youngman scripsit:
>
> > If such concern is excessive, it would not have been necessary for
> > POSIX to invent "find ... -exec ... {} +".   Nor for GNU to invent
> > "find -print0" or "sort -z".
>
> It's not quite so simple.  "find -print0" and "xargs -print0", its
> counterpart, let people deal with pathnames that contain spaces
> as well as newlines.

While that is true, those utilities already coped with the space
character (for example, with "find -print" and "xargs -L").

> That's not a problem for "comm" or its friends.

I use comm for comparing lists of files more frequently than anything
else.  But maybe that's just me...

> There is no particular reason AFAIU to single out 'comm' here.  If
> you want to retrofit zero-delimited records into all the coreutils
> (and 'awk' and many others too) that's a different matter.

I agree.   comm is not a special case.

James.