Re: Is this bug in who?

[James Youngman]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Subash Patel <address@hidden> wrote:
> James,
>                                I appreciate your prompt reply. I am
> pasting the cut section from "info coreutils who"
> -----
> If given two non-option arguments, `who' prints only the entry for
> the user running it (determined from its standard input), preceded by
> the hostname.  Traditionally, the two arguments given are `am i', as in
> `who am i'.
> -----
>                Although I have been using this command for a long time,
> I never gave a thought to try something like today, which happened by a
> typo. As per this document, "am I" is considered as arguments (most
> common one). So isnt it required to validate them? "Who abcd abcd" has
> no meaning when the purpose was "who am I", and both throw same output.

In terms of the specification at
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/who.html,
we're required to support "am I" and "am i".   We're doing that.   But
there is no standard interpretation of any other non-option arguments.

Hence the current behaviour is allowable, but if I understand you
correctly you're just pointing out that it is surprising.    I guess
it is, really.   I'm not really sure though on what grounds we should
restrict the allowed arguments, or how we should explain the new
restrictions to the user.

James.