Re: [TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix

Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: |> sed *n l pathname |> |> The latter also has the advantage that its output is | |> unambiguous, whereas the output of historical cat *etv is not. |> |> But mind you, in preparation of this email i found a bug in |> Busybox sed(1) which simply echoes nothing for the above. | |I assume that * is a typo for - . If so, sed did just what |-n tells it to--no printing except as called for by p or P. It seems to be a problem of (the PDF to text conversion and) the musl C library environment used on this box: ?0[steffen@essex tmp]$ echo *e | s-hex 00000000 e2 88 92 65 0a |...e.| 00000005 ?0[steffen@essex tmp]$ echo *e | iconv -f utf8 -t ascii *e ?0[steffen@essex tmp]$ command -v iconv /usr/bin/iconv ?0[steffen@essex tmp]$ apk info --who-owns /usr/bin/iconv /usr/bin/iconv is owned by musl-utils-1.1.16-r22 And of course because of mailx's "set reply-in-same-charset" ending up using US-ASCII. |And speaking of sed anticipating other tools, the inclusion |of "head" in v7 as a complement to "tail" was a close call |because head is subsumed by sed q. The difference being that these can be implemented as shell script wrappers around (modern) sed easily, whereas the -vet thing would require painful awk scripting, by reading bytewise and string comparing each of those bytes against a sprintf("%c",0.255) and a tree of if conditions, without having tried it. And then head and tail are self-describing, whereas -vet as a modifier for file content c(onc)atenation i never had problems with, but looking for that feature in a stream editor is more obvious for the unaware. |Doug Ju-hu! --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)