Rewrite of Unix(Tm) 'paste' command posted to net.sources

Dave Ihnat, Chicago, IL ignatz at ihuxx.UUCP
Fri Aug 17 07:51:52 AEST 1984


Well, this finishes the cut/paste set.  The source and man
page for my re-write of the 'paste' command has been posted
to net.sources.  As before, it has absolutely no proprietary
code or documentation; enjoy.

When the debate over the buggy '-s' option was finally over,
the overwhelming majority of requests was to fix the bug; so
I did.  To ease my conscience, there has been a trouble report
filed with the providers of the Unix(Tm) command, so it, too,
should be fixed. (Someday).
Incidentally, among the ideas offered, some people suggested a
command-line switch to turn the bug on or off at execution time,
and some to put the 'bug' in with #ifdef'd code, to enable/disable
it at compile time.  I decided against both because--well, certainly
one reason was, I didn't want to do the extra work--but it is,
after all, a *bug*; and one of my jobs is to kill bugs.  So, *splat.*

Some others suggested eliminating the '-s' option altogether.  No!
I want to use this opportunity to ask others--DON'T DO THIS TYPE OF
THING!  Cripes, the idea is to provide a downward-compatible utility!
Enough things work differently on BSD and Bell Unix--
'echo -n "Hi, there"' vs 'echo "Hi, there\n"', for instance--why
introduce another one, just because *you* never used that option?

Anyway...just let me push the soapbox back under the desk..there.
As before, it's run on a CP/M system and a Vax running System V; and
to the best of my knowledge, and according to the 4.2 manual at my
elbow, it should run on any 4.2 system, too.  Please report any
bugs to me by mail.

	Dave Ihnat
	ihuxx!ignatz



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