Re: Broken --inverse flag.

[Eric Blake]

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According to Daniel Kersten on 7/9/2009 5:09 AM:
> Hi,
> 
> There appears to be a bug in coreutils. The --inverse flag appears to
> be missing or broken from most utils.

That's not a bug, but a feature request, unless you can point to prior art
of some other implementation that has implemented the option for the
specific tools in question.

> Example:
> 
> $ ps --inverse
> -- ERROR: Unknown gnu long option.

ps is not part of GNU coreutils.  You will need to address this particular
request to a different list.

> $ ls --inverse
> ls: unrecognized option `--inverse'

In ls, it's spelled '--hide', not '--inverse'.  But the feature of
exempting certain patterns from being listed is already present.

> $ rm --inverse foo
> rm: unrecognized option `--inverse'

I could see that it might be useful to call something like
 rm *.c --except foo.c
but it would take someone to write a patch, and it does not scratch my
itch enough for me to be the one to bother doing it.

> $ echo --inverse "hello"
> --inverse hello

Huh?  What's the inverse of printing a string?  I don't think you can come
up with any sane semantics for 'echo --inverse', not to mention that echo
is already in the special category of having a difficult time,
standards-wise, for justifying any command-line options.

> Is this bug fix on the current roadmap? When can I expect it to be fixed?

It's not a bug, and since you are the first to suggest it, there is no
roadmap to include it unless someone wants to contribute a patch.  This is
open source, so feel free to start coding if you want it that badly!

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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