On Thu, May 4, 2017, at 19:14, Larry McVoy wrote: I mean, there's a legitimate argument that some of them would have been just as useful or more as separate utilities than as flags. But to some extent the fully generalized version seems questionable. I mean, to apply the design philosophy to, say, ls -t (nevermind that this particular flag has in fact existed since Unix V1, it's exactly the *kind* of thing that should prompt someone who is consistently applying Pike's idea of the unix philosophy to say "sorting should be the sort tool"), you would have to have A) a basic "ls" command which does all the filesystem-accessing work and prints timestamps and all other relevant output in a format that can be sorted lexicographically, B) run it through sort(1), C) a command [or maybe an awk script] that will pare it back down to the usual human-readable formats (names only, ls -l, or maybe a timestamp-and-name format, with human-friendly timestamps). And then D) another tool to sort it into columns. And you'd have to type in all of those every time you want a directory listing, or maybe have it packaged up in a script (which would then need a name, and unique names for every combination of behaviors you might want to use). At that point, who gets to decide that ls -t is useful enough to be "proper unix" but cat -v is "some ridiculous idea from berkeley"? Anyway, on the original subject of unlimited symbol name and filename lengths - ultimately there's a tradeoff - your symbols or filenames probably don't have to get very large before it makes more sense to use a variable-length format to save space, and the smallest reasonable limit for a variable-length format is 255.

I asked my wife (who is a longer-term Sun person than me and also went through this) if my memory was correct (I now keep elaborate and deeply unpublishable notes but I didn't then) and she immediately said 'echo -n': this was presumably either in /(usr/)?bin/echo in BSD/SunOS 4 or in the /bin/sh builtin, and not in the versions for SunOS 5 with resulting horrible failures of scripts all over the place. I think I can sort of see why the serious-standards-compliance-even-when-the-standard-is-horrible thing might have seemed like it would appeal to the kind of organisations Sun wanted to sell to (ones where people wear suits), but it also drove their traditional userbase to Linux/*BSD and this did not help them in the long term. (Also: do the standards say 'thou shall have no other options but these', because if they do they are terrible standards).