[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Adam Thornton]

I was today years old when I learned that GNU sort has a -h option.  Which
doesn't mean "help" but means "use human-friendly units."

Except I sort of derived its existence from first principles.  Someone
wanted a way to find disk hogs (they were on a Linux box), but also wanted
SI units, and I said to myself, "self, doesn't that sound like exactly the
sort of baroque and vaguely nauseating option that GNU would add to sort?"
Turns out it is.

Well, I mean, the MacOS man page just says that -h is an extension to POSIX
(yes, it's there on MacOS too), but I will eat a small hat of mine if it
didn't come to sort via GNU.

Adam

On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 5:07 PM John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 3:47 PM Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I wish shells didn't supoprt globbing, and that glob(1) would be a
>> standalone
>> program still today.  It would simplify much of the quoting issues if
>> most
>> characters were just characters to the shell.
>>
>
> I like the way the rc shell works: globbing is done, but any word in
> single quotes suppresses all interpretation (double quote has no meaning)
>
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