On Wed, 21 Nov 2007, Dave Ihnat wrote: > 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. yes, i now appreciate that cut's behaviour is the very efficient technique of treating the data as a one-way stream, so i'm good with that. so lay off already. ya hear me?? LAY OFF!!! double shot espresso: accept no substitutes. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca ========================================================================
