Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 00:10:51 +1100 (EST) From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> To: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> Cc: Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net>, <freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: bin/35505: [PATCH] Feature enhancement for sed(1) Message-ID: <20020306000043.H4867-100000@gamplex.bde.org> In-Reply-To: <20020305030435.F3880@over-yonder.net>
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On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 01:24:19AM +1100 I heard the voice of
> Bruce Evans, and lo! it spake thus:
> >
> > The functionality is already provided in a better way by the -E flag.
> > I agree with the gnu standard which says:
> >
> > ! Please don't make the behavior of a utility depend on the name used to
> > ! invoke it. It is useful sometimes to make a link to a utility with a
> > ! different name, and that should not change what it does.
>
> I find that especially humerous, given that GNU {e,f,z}grep was what
> inspired me to write the patch in the first place...
GNU had to keep [ef]grep for historical reasons. GNU zgrep has to have
a different name because it is a different utility (at least in the old
version of it in FreeBSD) -- it is an (unused in FreeBSD) shell script in
the gzip distribution. zgrep as part of grep is a FreeBSD hack, at least
in the version in FreeBSD. Even if it were part of GNU egrep, it would
have to have a link named zgrep for backwards compatibility.
Bruce
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