On 24/09/2026 07:51, Iván Ezequiel Rodriguez wrote:
Hello,
I would like feedback on iv, a small line-oriented utility that
exposes common text transformations directly as command-line
operations rather than through an embedded editing language.
The intended scope is deliberately narrow: substitute, delete,
replace, insert and append; literal or POSIX ERE matching;
stdin/stdout composition; and optional in-place replacement.
Search, count and tail operations are deliberately left to grep,
wc and tail.
The design question I would like feedback on is:
Is an explicit-operation interface for common line-oriented
transformations sufficiently distinct and useful to justify a
separate GNU utility?
Personally I see the functionality overlaps too much with sed
to warrant a separate utility.
If so, I would also like feedback on whether Coreutils is an
appropriate home for it and which parts of the current interface
should be reduced before proposing a patch.
If not, I would be particularly interested in whether the
objection is to the abstraction itself, its current scope, or
specifically to Coreutils as its home.
If we were to add such a utility, coreutils might be a good location.
The performance results look interesting.
It might point to optimization opportunities in sed,
where simple transformations might branch to specific processing.
thanks,
Padraig
