Ralf Wildenhues <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> join perhaps; it's quite stable so long as you run it in the C locale >> and stick to the old features. cut I'm not so sure about; it's kind >> of persnickety. > > What exactly does the word "persnickety" mean here, and in which way is > cut that way?
'cut' tends to have more little bugs that you have to work around. (Not that I'm an expert; I try not to use it.) > fold, split, join, cut, paste 'split' and 'join' are traditional and portable. 'fold', 'cut', and 'paste' are relative newcomers, as they were not part of Unix Version 7 and (if I recall correctly) were not in earlier BSD versions. > The distinction in make-stds.texi doesn't make a lot of > sense to me, really. I think it is a list that evolved over a long period of time, with applications being installed on a lot of machines. > split, cut, and paste are not easily replaceable by awk, due to the > line length limitations of the latter (input must be text file). True. I try to avoid non-text-files in my applications, but the line length limits can be a pain sometimes. > I haven't tried for join yet 'join' input must be text files, according to POSIX. > So, how portable are these tools? Most systems have them all these days, I assume. But like I said, I don't want to be the first to find the bugs in 'fold', 'cut', and 'paste'.
