Bruno Haible wrote: > But OTOH, I didn't follow compatibility with Linux /bin/hostname in two > points: > - When the machine has multiple long names (i.e. some aliases), > my "hostname -f" prints them all, one per line. Linux "/bin/hostname -f" > prints only the first one, but has an extra option "-a": > "/bin/hostname -a" prints the names except the first one, all in one > line, each followed by a space.
Personally I have never liked the -f and -s options. Their purpose seems counter to The Right Way of just setting the hostname properly in the first place. :-) Let me tell you a story about something that always frustrates me. A particular commercial vendor's operating system has a history of going for years without providing a particular program such that people will provide their own. (Think patch, rsync, ssh, perl, rdist, elm, ldd.) But then suddenly the vendor will start supplying a version of said program with their OS. Which should be fine. Only instead of providing a version in wide use the vendor will, for no known rationale, instead provide one that is different in some trivial and incompatible way. Arg! That is very frustrating. Now there needs to be two of the programs installed. The system supplied one and the "compatible" one. (The painful part of this is deciding which is compatible with which.) Many scripts use fqdn=`hostname -f` as a way to get the fully qualified name of the host it is running on. How many? I don't know. I did a simple survey of my own machine for a sampling. But I think it would cause at least some script breakage if that did not work that way. (Certainly it causes breakage now on my older systems without the -f option.) One problem I see is that since most hosts have only one name this would appear to work for many authors and yet would fail on so many other hosts that do have multiple names. This is bound to trip up people. I fear that many users would find this (may I say "new"?) behavior frustrating. On my Debian GNU/Linux system I surveyed the package config scripts of my installed packages. These are nothing more than a set of scripts written by many different people of which I had available for this survey. Don't read more into this than the simple brute force single example which it is. I found a few packages which use hostname with an option. This is out of 731 installed packages. There are 10,000 more that I don't have installed. hostname -f: kdm hostname -d: slrn, tin hostname --fqdn: postfix hostname --domain: postfix Running 'grep -r hostname.*- /usr/bin' turned up a few with --fqdn plus 'xon' and 'startx' which both used 'hostname -f'. > - "hostname -i" surrounds the IP address with brackets in my implementation, > whereas it does not in the Linux /bin/hostname. I have not yet actually seen a script which used 'hostname -i' in the wild. So I don't have an opinion about this difference. On many hosts the output of 'hostname -i' is 127.0.0.1 anyway which has probably kept the usage minimal. Do the brackets surve a purpose? Call me a minimalist. Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
