From owner-freebsd-current  Tue Sep 24 15: 2: 8 2002
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Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 18:02:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>
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To: Bill Fenner <fenner@research.att.com>
Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Who broke sort(1) ?
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<<On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 14:09:31 -0700, Bill Fenner <fenner@research.att.com> said:

> When's the first time the FreeBSD sort(1) man page mentioned that this
> syntax was deprecated?  Can we at least start from there?

It does not appear to have ever been properly documented.

I don't object to maintaining backwards compatibility for a few more
releases (even if the application writers are the ones at fault),
since many more people read the manual pages than read the Standard.
However, I would point out that this isn't the first time we broke a
traditional syntax in favor of reducing restrictions on argument
names: see the recent history of chown(8).

-GAWollman


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