Re: [coreutils] join feature: auto-format

[Pádraig Brady]

On 12/01/11 18:04, Assaf Gordon wrote:
> Pádraig Brady wrote, On 01/11/2011 07:35 AM:
>>
>> Spending another few minutes on this, I realized
>> that we should not be trying to homogenize the number
>> of fields from each file, but rather the fields used
>> for a particular file in each line. The only sensible
>> basis for that is the first line as previously suggested.
>>
>> The interface would be a little different for that.
>> I was thinking of:
>>
>>   -o 'header'  Infer the format from the first line of each file
>>
> I second the idea of using the first line as the basis for the 
> auto-formatting,
> but have reservation about the wording: '-o header' somewhat implies that the 
> first line has to be an actual header line (with column names or similar), 
> while it can just be the first line of actual data if the file doesn't have a 
> header line.
> 
> Something like '-o auto' might be less confusing.

I've attached a patch that implements the above.
I'll hold off applying for a short while as
we might be doing a bug fix release.

cheers,
Pádraig.

join-auto-format.diff
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