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minor 'cat' enhancement w/ patch
From: |
Tom Warzeka |
Subject: |
minor 'cat' enhancement w/ patch |
Date: |
Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:56:22 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0 SeaMonkey/2.15.1 |
Hello! I sometimes use 'cat -E' as a quick check for lines with trailing
white space. I understand that '$' was chosen as the end-of-line character
due to its usage in regular expressions. However, I like to use a more
conspicuous character, such as '@'. So, I thought, how about letting the
user specify the end-of-line character? While doable with 'sed', it was
quite easy to add an option to accomplish this. My proposed new syntax is:
cat -E -c @ ...
or
cat --show-ends --end-char=@ ...
It is minimally intrusive and does not affect backward compatibility: when
one of the new options is not specified, the end-of-line character is still
'$'. Alternatively, use of one of these options could automatically turn-on
displaying an end-of-line character
(just add "show_ends = true;" within the new case).
Here's my patch submitted for your perusal. It is applied to
coreutils-8.20, the current latest stable release. If you decide to include
it, feel free to make any changes you see fit. Thanks!
-- Tom
cat-coreutils-8.20.patch
Description: Text Data
- minor 'cat' enhancement w/ patch,
Tom Warzeka <=