Re: bug in hostname

[Steven Augart]

I looked through the Open Group documents that the letters you sent me 
pointed to.  I'm not clear on whether it's required to reject unknown 
arguments starting with a - but not after a --.  That would significantly 
influence my implementation -- I would prefer to have hostname work like 
this:

hostname foo.bar.com
        Sets the hostname
hostname --fqdn
        retrieves the hostname as an FQDN
hostname -f
        ditto
hostname --long-option-I-never-heard-of
        rejected with a usage message
hostname -- --long-option-I-never-heard-of
        sets the host name to --long-option-I-never-heard-of

But I'm wondering if there might be a reason that coreutils's "hostname" 
recognizes
--help and --version but takes --anything-else as being a hostname.  Is 
there a reference that implies that the current behaviour is preferred?


--Steve Augart





Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
10/07/2003 02:50 PM
 
        To:     Steven Augart/Watson/Contr/address@hidden
        cc:     address@hidden, Martin MOKREJ? 
<address@hidden>
        Subject:        Re: bug in hostname


Steven Augart <address@hidden> wrote:
> Paul Jarc's point that the GNU/Hurd system will need a hostname program 
is
> well put.  Perhaps we could provide a simple way for more casual users 
not
> to install the hostname program.  But really, if we add simple support 
for
> --fqdn and --short (as well as -f and -s) it would meet my needs.

I'm hoping someone will submit a patch :-)

> Thanks for the warning.  I'm not sure what you mean by "Conforming
> Environment".  Is there some level of Posix conformance here?  At any
> rate, my environment is apparently non-conforming, since the "tail" I
> built is happily taking options like "-1".
>
> Is there an online discussion of the topic you could point me to?

These two give most of the details.

  http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-09/msg00085.html
  http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-09/msg00087.html

This is becoming a FAQ.