On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 02:50:03PM +0800, Ed Greshko wrote: > You would have to ask the writers (David Ihnat, David MacKenzie, and Jim > Meyering). Actually, I originally wrote cut & paste, but after the initial release, left it on its own. Thankfully, David MacKenzie and Jim Meyering (neither of whom I've ever met or communicated with) picked up the ball and kept working on the programs. (And whatever prompted me to spend the time to recreate these programs? I was working on a Unix clone called 'Venix', and was annoyed that it didn't have these commands.) I wrote the programs to be as close to identical to the original Unix System 5 man page as I could, and "reverse-engineered" it from the man page description of behavior and options, deliberately not ever referring to or accessing the original source, since it was copyrighted material of AT&T. At the time I was reverse engineering it, I asked numerous questions on Usenet as to whether I should fix obvious bugs or deviations in behavior, or extend the command; the overwhelming response was "make it behave like the 'real' command". Now, as to why it does what it does? I don't know for sure, since I didn't go find whoever wrote the original and ask. But I can guess--"do one thing, and do it well." Cut is supposed to get fields from a line-delimited data stream. Period. Rearrangement is an added function--one that might be useful, certainly; but that can be done via other shell tools. Cheers, -- Dave Ihnat President, DMINET Consulting, Inc. dihnat@xxxxxxxxxx
