Re: Multibyte support for sort, uniq, join, tr, cut, paste, expand, unexpand, fmt, fold, and pr

[Eric Fischer]

Thanks. The paperwork code is [gnu.org #1262124]. The deadline comes from
the copyright assignment document, which "applies to all past and future
works, made by April 30, 2018, of Developer…." I'm not sure quite how that
came to be the agreement between Mapbox and FSF, but that's what I've got
to work with.

I'll fix the warnings from make syntax-check, add the copyright header to
the new files, run code coverage, add references in the documentation to
wide character support, and squash the commits.

I understand that performance is important. I have already added a special
case for the common case of reading single-byte characters and a cache for
looking up character widths, since those were the places where I
encountered bad performance in my own use of the tools. I will happily
optimize anything else that turns out to be a bottleneck for someone else.

I will also be happy to add workarounds for bugs in Cygwin and AIX if
anyone can give me access to those operating systems for testing, but I
currently have no ability to test in those environments and do not want to
make changes blindly.

Eric