On 2025-07-28 09:23, Pádraig Brady wrote:
Yes it's a fair point. We don't want existing scripts that use -f to start pausing unexpectedly. I suppose this is a case for only pausing with -f if POSIXLY_CORRECT env var is set.
Although backward compatibility is an issue, the current behavior is clearly wrong for the intended use of -f, which is for logins via printing terminals so stdout is the printer. So a better way to think about it is that this is merely a longstanding obscure bug in GNU 'pr' that we can fix.
The only reason we haven't noticed the bug before, is that nobody has seriously used those terminals in decades, so nobody has run into the bug and taken the time to report it.
Other 'pr' implementations (e.g., FreeBSD) do the right thing here, and I see no significant reason (other than inertia) for us to be both wrong for the intended use and incompatible with the rest of the world.
