Re: who: sorted output + minor usage change

[Pádraig Brady]

On 14/02/15 21:51, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 14/02/15 21:34, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
>> On 02/09/2015 10:27 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>> I'll look about adding placeholders so that who -a is processable.
>>
>> I'm not so enthusiastic about this - I mean changing the default format.
>> What about adding an option like --output=LIST instead, with LINE being
>> a comma-separated list of 'name', 'line', 'idle', 'pid', etc.?
> 
> That would be a bit overkill for who I think.
> The issue is only with who -a, and solaris at least has placeholders
> for name in that case. You could only parse the existing output
> in a fixed offset manner, which adding a placeholder wouldn't impact.
> So I'm 60:40 for changing this, and 60:40 for just adding placeholders.

I forgot to say why I didn't do this in the last release.
I noticed that who -a wouldn't be generally processable
due to the variable number of fields introduced with translations.
Also the number/format of fields would be quite consistent
between each class (who -u, who -d, etc.), and processing
across all classes (who -a) would not generally be useful.

Given Assaf's case was already handled with:
  LC_ALL=C who -u | sort -b -k6,6
I didn't think it worth changing the output format.

Pádraig.