Re: Should "df --portability" allow thousands separators?

[Peter D.]

On Monday 26 February 2007 19:13, Paul Eggert wrote:
> "Peter D." <address@hidden> writes:
> > I am sufficiently ignorant of POSIX that df could be in completely
> > compliant and I would not know.
>
> It does conform, since you're in an en_US.UTF-8 locale, not the POSIX
> locale.  Also, POSIX reserves environment variables like BLOCK_SIZE to
> the implementation; portable POSIX applications are not allowed to set
> them.
>
> That being said, it might make sense for -P to ignore BLOCK_SIZE and
> the like.  Doing this wouldn't be 100% trivial, though; someone will
> have to think about it.

The man page says that "-P" equals "--portability" which equals POSIX and 
you say POSIX allows commas (and other regional thousands separators) 
therefore there is no bug in "df".  

It is a pity that "--portability" can produce outputs that will surprise 
programmers - unless you want to break the link between "--portability" and 
POSIX.  


-- 
sig goes here...
Peter D.