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

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Hej Fred,

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
breaks compatibility? Man, this is a new parameter to a known command
(date). If you have used this parameter before, I'd be surprised that it
worked...

> 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."
That's totally different.

> 
> Once you add functionality to a well known command, people will use it
> and write incompatible scripts with it.  This isn't good.
date is already incompatible in regards to options between Linux and
FreeBSD (and most probably between FreeBSD and other *nix too).
As are other commands too. I think of "top -I" vs. "top -i" for instance.

> 
> 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.
If the script was written for FreeBSD and to run on FreeBSD and this is
cleary stated at the very beginning of the shell script, than nobody has
any reason to whine because it's not running on another Operating System.
Same counts the other direction. If I'm writing a shell script under
Linux, I hardly do the extra work to replace "seq" with the FreeBSD
pendant (which exists, I know).
So what?

Your examples are all true, and I know them quite well (having FreeBSD
as my operating system of choice, but having to administrate several
hundreds of Linux boxes in our Data Centers).
But all you said doesn't count to this specific bikeshed about some
extra functionality to date or cat or whatever...


./Marian
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