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Re: Building binutils/gcc/glibc -
On Tue, 5 Jan 2004, Paul Eggert wrote:
> selected by somebody unexpectedly. See the thread rooted at
> <http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-09/msg00082.html>
> for more about this messy situation.
That thread hardly seems to justify not using the existing POSIXLY_CORRECT
variable to control this. Indeed the situation of rejecting "head -1"
seems perfectly to fit the description in
<http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-09/msg00094.html> -
"people are welcome to enable POSIXLY_CORRECT, but few should want to,
because doing so disables useful behavior" - "head -1" is the useful
behavior in question and few want to disable it. Indeed I cannot see a
requirement in POSIX at all to reject "head -1" (unlike cases where
obsolescent usage used + to introduce options, which must be treated as
file names starting with + instead).
--
Joseph S. Myers
jsm@polyomino.org.uk