Re: Adding a 'D - Date' option to 'cat'

I would like to weigh in here, with a different perspective on this issue.

Lets start with date, I would say date utility is the appropriate tool to
use for adding date to the stream of data, but I have an issue with
adding in all the parsing information. What would happen? At first only
newline parsing would occur, but then somebody would come along and
say "I would like to append date every third line", which would need another
change to date to accomplish the task. This would happen several times
over the years and in this way and I could see date becoming bloated for
this reason.

So maybe it is time to re-think what filters are and how they should work.

For instance if date did not have to parse the file and only had to append
to an object ( as apposed to a stream of characters), then the date utility
would only need append to the beginning or end of an object ( unless this
functionality already exits ) and would not need to worry about how to
parse the information (which could be binary data for all the date utility
would care).

Yes this would be more complicated then for current filter system, but
it also would have its advantages.

Anyway this is just some  food for thought and maybe a better system
could come out of it or not. I would write more about the issue but I kind
of dislike doing e-mail for some reason.