FreeBSD vs. Debian behavior discrepancy

[Michaël Guitton]

Hi there,

Not really a bug per se but rather a feature request. Gzip command on 
Debian Squeeze should not ouput any message when invoked with no 
arguments and -q option has been specified -- e.g. on FreeBSD, -q option 
*does* suppress all warnings and gzip keeps its mouth shut even if exit 
status is greater than 0 (!?) Before submitting this bug report, I 
downloaded gzip 1.4 on my Debian system and compiled it but got the same 
behavior as the installed 1.3.12 version.

IMHO, Gzip should work the same across operating systems for the 
following command:

$ find /my/stuff -mtime +7 -name '*.csv' -print0 | xargs -0 gzip -q

which should fail silently when no files could match the search criterias.

Thank you.

--Michaël

=begin FreeBSD

$ uname -a
FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE #0: Mon Mar 8 16:08:18 UTC 2010 
address@hidden:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/PAE i386

$ gzip -V
FreeBSD gzip 20090621

$ gzip -q ; echo $?
1

=end FreeBSD

vs.

=begin Debian Squeeze

$ uname -a
Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Fri Sep 9 20:23:16 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ gzip -V
gzip 1.3.12

$ gzip -q ; echo $?
gzip: compressed data not written to a terminal. Use -f to force 
compression.
For help, type: gzip -h
1

=end Debian Squeeze