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

> Fred Gilham wrote:
>
> 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.

Put a note in the manpage, that use in scripts is deprecated.
If its implementation is simple and its functionality needed by users,  
perhaps others will pick up the feature.
I think this can be called progress.

If people still write incompatible scripts with it, they won't come here  
to complain. They'll go and complain where the feature is missing. And  
this is not necessarily a bad thing.


-- 
Ullrich Franke