Re: Dog & cat (original) (raw)

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From: Pádraig Brady
Subject: Re: Dog & cat
Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:05:39 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130110 Thunderbird/17.0.2

On 09/04/2013 10:14 AM, Pascal wrote:

Hi,

cat - "concatenate files and print on the standard output" - offers -s option to suppress repeated empty lines.

However, an "empty" line (visual perspective) that behave only spaces or tabs is not considered as empty : one option -S that would address this scenario should be added to cat...

I hope to be clear :-)

While it's a fair suggestion, I'd be against adding this functionality to cat as it's outside of its core functionality.

Now even cat -s is debatable, but at least that is also implemented in FreeBSD and is an awkward enough operation to do in sed for example: http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/cat-_002ds.html

However a simple additional sed operation would suffice to implement -S. Something like: sed 's/^ *$//' | cat -s

So I'd be 70:30 against implementing this.

thanks, Pádraig.