small bug in who(1) of SVR3

[Robert Elz]

henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <18896 at rpp386.cactus.org> jfh at rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II)
>writes:
>>... Why should I be forced to... use pipes (ala "who | cut -d' ....

>I don't care how easy it was to add the "-q" option, it was a waste of the
>programmer's time.  A shell program using pipes could have been written in
>seconds, solving the problem without messing around with "who".

This is sheer religious fervour taken to extremes ... the simply fact is
that "who" is one of the most baroque commands in unix, if it had originally
been more like (say) "ls", where "who" gave a simple list of users, and
"who -l" gave similar output to the traditional "who", no-one would even
think of complaining about it - but because it wasn't originally done
that way, it's apparently heresy to suggest that anything be changed.

Now I've never seen a "who" with a "-q" option, so I can't comment on
how well the change was thought out (comments here make me suspect not
well at all, but that's hearsay only), but the question of whether a
change should be made at all is simply not suitably answered by "never".

kre