Re: inconsistent behavior of sort -z

[Philip Rowlands]

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Stanislav Brabec wrote:

> Comparing coreutins with busybox I found following inconsistency in 
> the GNU coreutils:
>
> GNU sort -z documents:
> use NUL instead of EOL on input

Right, more specifically:

"Treat the input as a set of lines, each terminated by a null character 
(ASCII NUL) instead of a line feed (ASCII LF)."

> GNU sort -z does:
> use NUL instead of EOL on input and output

Does this not follow as a corollary of the documentation? The way I read 
it, -z tells sort to "use NUL instead of LF".

Do you see the NUL/LF as a separator or end-marker? In other words, 
isn't the terminating character part of the line, to be carried through 
and printed to the output? That's my understanding, and considering the 
practical implications, if the user had a genuine need for 
NUL-terminated lines (awkward filenames, etc), surely the output must be 
similarly NUL-terminated, otherwise the concept of a "line" becomes 
confused.

> Note that implementing it as documented would break GNU findutils 
> updatedb, as happens with busybox.

Agreed, busybox appears to handle -z differently.


Cheers,
Phil