Re: wc command

[Eric Blake]

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According to Andrew McGill on 12/22/2008 1:38 AM:
> My guess is that while it would be friendly to provide a similar message for 
> wc (od, head, tail, etc), it would violate something posixy (and is therefore 
> imposixable).

It would be possible to add a conditional check, where if POSIXLY_CORRECT
is not defined in the environment and a filter app is started with a tty
as stdin and stderr (ie. the same criteria for what POSIX requires bash to
use for whether a shell is interactive), then we issue a warning to
stderr.  Normally, we don't like adding additional uses of
POSIXLY_CORRECT, but this particular idea may help stave off confusion.
Care to write such a patch?  It would need to be applied to all of the
coreutils that can act as a filter, not just wc.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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