> With the other non-standard changes being made to the > default > environment, I wonder if it is time to finally bite > the bullet and merge > some of the XPG4 and Sun commands -- some of the > differences exist for > some rather silly (IMO) semantic differences that > portable code should > not rely on. > > For example, rm differs in some very subtle ways > about conflicts of -f > and -i options, and handling of non-readable/writable > directories. > > chown differs in the way symbolic links are followed > in the presence of > the -r flag. > > XPG4 awk is really just nawk. > > XPG4 grep has more flexible regular expression > support (see -E and -F) > > who has slightly different default output for POSIX. > > XPG4 du is noisy by default on unreadable > directories, and uses a space > instead of a tab. > > I'm sure there are some others like this. > > I'm just thinking, isn't it time we just bit the > bullet and told our > users to start using the POSIX defaults, instead of > continuing to supply > the legacy compatibility stuff forever. > > It would save a little space, and maybe we could get > rid of /usr/xpg4/bin ? >
While I don't know that I'd go that far, I think gawk is one of the (IMO all too few) examples of a really good GNU implementation: the developers worked with the original awk developers (from what I've read) to get clarification on a lot of compatibility issues. And gawk doesn't fall over on long lines or huge numbers of fields per line like the other implementations do. Is there any particular reason why gawk (named awk or nawk) couldn't replace both /usr/xpg4/bin/awk and /usr/bin/nawk? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list opensolaris-code@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
