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Re: inconsistent documentation of sort -z


From: Stanislav Brabec
Subject: Re: inconsistent documentation of sort -z
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:33:01 +0100

Philip Rowlands wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Stanislav Brabec wrote:

> "Treat the input as a set of lines, each terminated by a null character 
> (ASCII NUL) instead of a line feed (ASCII LF)."

I mentioned this as a documentation problem. (I changed mail subject.)

More correct would be "Treat the input and generate the output...".

> > GNU sort -z does:
> > use NUL instead of EOL on input and output
> 
> Does this not follow as a corollary of the documentation? The way I read 
> it, -z tells sort to "use NUL instead of LF".
> 
> Do you see the NUL/LF as a separator or end-marker?

Yes, this is logical (and only usable) behavior. But documentation
mentions only "input", so one may be in doubt...

> > Note that implementing it as documented would break GNU findutils 
> > updatedb, as happens with busybox.
> 
> Agreed, busybox appears to handle -z differently.

...as probably were authors of busybox. Their implementation does
exactly what GNU sort info page writes about -z.
http://bugs.busybox.net/view.php?id=1591

-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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