1003.2 Command Groups

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

From: hoptoad!gnu at lll-crg.arpa (John Gilmore)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 86 02:57:15 PST

A general suggestion on the command groups:  provide just two sets.  A
mandatory group and a group that "if you have this function, you must
provide it under this name", a la X3.64.  No requirement that every
command in the optional group must be there if any of them are, or that
if a command exists it must accept all the possible arguments; just a
name we can agree on for each function that a vendor is likely to
provide and a portable shell script is likely to invoke.

What happened to "fgrep"?  If "grep" and "egrep" are mandatory, "fgrep"
should be also.  (Of course, there should only be one grep, but for
hysterical compatability it should be callable by three names with
slightly different sets of arguments!)

Why are "uucp" and "uux" not considered reasonable things for a shell
script or C program to execute?  One of the few things that Unix does
that nobody else does is UUCP.  Is it going to be possible to sell a
POSIX system without UUCP?  Ditto for "mail"...

I don't understand the philosophy that includes "cc" but excludes "as" and
is not sure about "lint" and "m4" and "strip".  I see a lot of makefiles
assuming all of these.  I presume a makefile is close enough to a shell
script to be interesting to the working group.

I suggest that "cpio" be excluded.  Maybe they'll stop distributing
System V on byte-order-dependent cpio tapes if it becomes non-standard.

Dump "pack" but put "compress" into the optional section.

There should be some way for shell scripts to invoke a pager.  I don't
care which one -- we can all link our system's favorite pager to the name
you choose.  Few or no fancy options required on it though; make it generic.

Tail should be in the mandatory set of commands.

df and du are useful, but their output format is not standardized.
Since mostly shellscripts use these to parse their output e.g. to see
if there is enough free space, this must be specified if they are
to be useful.

I can't find "dircmp", "id", and a bunch of others in either V7 or 4.2
so I suspect it is not very portable to assume their existence.  Reject...

Volume-Number: Volume 9, Number 7