From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Apr 10  9: 0:44 2002
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Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 18:00:38 +0200
From: Matthias Buelow <mkb@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de>
To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>
Cc: Bogdan TARU <bgd@icomag.de>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: 'rm' incompatibility with Posix.2
Message-ID: <20020410160038.GA71167@reiher.informatik.uni-wuerzburg>
References: <20020410091302.Y79904-200000@fw.cgn.icom> <xzpelhnws5i.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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Dag-Erling Smorgrav writes:

>Please don't.  This functionality is extremely useful.  Consider this:

It may be useful but it is nonstandard.

>In my humble opinion, Solaris (and every other *nix) is broken in this
>respect, and *BSD is correct.

How do you define "correctness"?  Solaris ls(1) non-arguably conforms to
XPG/4 / SuSV2, the current UNIX(tm) standard, and FreeBSD ls(1) doesn't.
On Solaris (and SuSV2), you can get the desired behaviour with ls -f
(force interpretation as a directory), which of course collides with BSD
ls' "-f Output is not sorted".  IMHO standardization and interoperability
are more important than a small and questionable gain from using incompatible
interfaces.  If you want the interface to change, change the standard.
And no "the good thing with standards is that there are so many to chose
from" rants please; 4.xBSD is not a standard, SuSV2 is and I surely don't
want to follow down the path which you hint at with "every other *nix is
broken...and *BSD is correct".

--mkb (a proponent of /usr/ucb for the incompatible cruft)


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