Re: cut - lack of --merge-delimiters option

[Brian Dessent]

Jan Skowron wrote:

> coreutils program "cut" could use a "merge delimiters" option.
> 
> Common use case: ls -l | cut ...
> One needs to print 7-th column of ls -l to see all times of
> modifications. But there is no constant number of delimiters between

If you are only interested in times, why not ask the tool for just that
information, e.g. stat -c %y *

> merge delimiters option would help a lot in such cases. Without it
> users are forced to use "gawk" instead of "cut".

And what's wrong with that?  Or stated differently, awk is a standard
and portable tool, whereas "new version of cut with new option that
isn't yet present on many systems" isn't.  Based on traffic on this list
it seems there is still a large number of people using coreutils 5.x
which is more than 2 years old at best.  Any new option that gets added
thus has this waiting period of a number of years before it can be
reasonably assumed to be in common use.  And even then, people that want
to write portable scripts still can't use the option, because it won't
be in other 'cut' implementations, such as Darwin's or Sun's or the
BSD's, etc.

In short: adding options to standard commands when a portable solution
already exists does not make a lot of sense, and the coreutils
maintainers are very resistant to doing it as a result.

Brian