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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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