Re: list of portable tools

[Paul Eggert]

Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

>> join perhaps; it's quite stable so long as you run it in the C locale
>> and stick to the old features.  cut I'm not so sure about; it's kind
>> of persnickety.
>
> What exactly does the word "persnickety" mean here, and in which way is
> cut that way?

'cut' tends to have more little bugs that you have to work around.
(Not that I'm an expert; I try not to use it.)

>   fold, split, join, cut, paste

'split' and 'join' are traditional and portable.  'fold', 'cut', and
'paste' are relative newcomers, as they were not part of Unix Version 7
and (if I recall correctly) were not in earlier BSD versions.

> The distinction in make-stds.texi doesn't make a lot of
> sense to me, really.

I think it is a list that evolved over a long period of time, with
applications being installed on a lot of machines.

> split, cut, and paste are not easily replaceable by awk, due to the
> line length limitations of the latter (input must be text file).

True.  I try to avoid non-text-files in my applications, but the line
length limits can be a pain sometimes.

> I haven't tried for join yet

'join' input must be text files, according to POSIX.

> So, how portable are these tools?

Most systems have them all these days, I assume.  But like I said, I
don't want to be the first to find the bugs in 'fold', 'cut', and
'paste'.