Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 18:47:18 +0200 (CEST) From: Harti Brandt <brandt@fokus.fraunhofer.de> To: Stephen McKay <smckay@internode.on.net> Cc: Albert Cahalan <albert@users.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: posix ps (was Re: Adding `pgrep' and `pkill' to /usr/bin) Message-ID: <20040328184244.I10175@beagle.fokus.fraunhofer.de> In-Reply-To: <200403280808.i2S88aJ7016011@dungeon.home> References: <p0602046abc879c5fe2f9@[128.113.24.47]> <20040325070120.GA67497@VARK.homeunix.com> <p06020494bc8a5738af2f@[128.113.24.47]> <200403280808.i2S88aJ7016011@dungeon.home>
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On Sun, 28 Mar 2004, Stephen McKay wrote: SM>On Saturday, 27th March 2004, Garance A Drosihn wrote: SM> SM>>>$ PERSONALITY=freebsd ps -? SM>> SM>>Secondly, I personally am not fond of commands which COMPLETELY SM>>change their behavior based on environment variables. Different SM>>options, different formats, different rules. SM> SM>Unifying ps on all Unices (including FreeBSD) is an excellent idea, and SM>I fully support this. SM> SM>Using an environment variable (no matter what name is used) to switch SM>between radically different personalities is an appalling idea. No script SM>can depend on the output of ps thereafter. Well, that is just like LANG or LC_ALL. You cannot depend on parsing utility output until you set LC_ALL=C, yet I have still to see a script that does this. If you happen to write a script for BSD syntax just put LC_ALL=C PERSONALITY=BSD on top of it. SM>If multiple personalities is a desirable trait (and it's not clear that it SM>is) then command line switches and aliases are the correct mechanisms to SM>use. That would require to add that switch to all utility calls in a script that have multiple personalities. Thats far from beeing desirable. harti
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