bug#9085: 'split' feature request: an option to uses e.g. '.001' as first suffix.

[Pádraig Brady]

On 01/30/2012 10:29 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 01/29/2012 10:34 PM, Jérémy Compostella wrote:
>> Pádraig, Sci-Fi, others,
>>
>> I made an implementation of the requested feature. With the attached
>> patch applied the split command accepts a new optional "from" argument
>> for the --numeric-suffixes (aka -d) option. If this argument is
>> specified, the numeric suffix counts from this value, otherwise, like
>> before, it counts from 0.
>>
>> I've tried to not impact the performance, to not break anything and to
>> respect the coding rules but feel free to comment this patch. I will
>> take into account whatever you may want.
> 
> Thanks again for looking at this.
> It's a useful feature for the presented use case,
> or for supporting multiple independent split invocations.
> 
> Note we rarely change an option to have optional args.
> For optional args, no space is allowed between option name and value.
> I.E. --numeric-suffixes=10 or -d10 is required, which is a little restrictive.
> More problematically though, existing scripts using the short options -de or 
> -du in
> combination will break.  The -eu options are relatively new though, so I'm 
> leaning
> towards this being acceptable. Hmm, this unusual form would fail too, `split 
> -da3 ...`.
> The failure mode is immediate and obvious, but this worries me a bit.
> 
> I wonder might we have a separate option, --suffix-start,
> and theoretically that could accept alphabetic options too?
> I'm not suggesting we do this, but it's worth discussing.

Think a bit more about it, it's probably worth to split
the short and long options. Have -d not take a param as before,
and have --numeric-suffixes take an optional param.

cheers,
Pádraig.