Re: Adding a '-D date' option to `cat'

I think there's a good reason for not adding features to the base tools
and that is that it breaks compatibility.  More than once I've ran afoul
of "bashisms" where people take for granted that everyone's sh is bash,
and the result is painful debugging or strange incomprehensible bug
reports that say in essence, "It doesn't work on my system and I don't
know why."

Once you add functionality to a well known command, people will use it
and write incompatible scripts with it.  This isn't good.

It may sound like I'm a dullard.  Maybe so, but I think many people are
in my shoes, and for us this kind of fiddling with the system utilities
is user-hostile.  It's much easier to see that a script doesn't work
because you don't have the "stamp" command than to wonder what the
"-zztop" flag to cat is supposed to do.

-- 
Fred Gilham                                  gilham_at_csl.sri.com
Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game
much closer to the one played in the real world.        -- Paul Graham