Re: [coreutils] basename/dirname can't handle stdin?

[Eric Blake]

On 01/12/2011 11:43 AM, Jeff Blaine wrote:
> I was surprised to find this today.
> 
> The following fails:
> 
>     echo /some/place/foo.txt | basename
> 
> This also fails:
> 
>     find /somewhere -print | xargs basename
> 
> This *does* work though, somehow, when the above does not:
> 
>     echo /some/place/foo.txt | xargs basename
> 
> What is going on here?  dirname is the same way.

POSIX requires that basename and dirname be passed arguments; they are
not required to run as filters.

That said, it would be awesome if someone would contribute the patches
to emulate the BSD extensions of:

     basename [-a] [-s suffix] string [...]

From there, it's not much harder to implement extensions that 0
arguments is an extension to operate in filter mode (although we may
want to require the use of basename --filter to make it obvious, and we
would certainly want basename --files-from0 to operate on find -print0
output).

But someone has to contribute the patch - are you willing?

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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