Re: Proposed modification to seq

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Brian Ginsbach <ginsbach%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:

> It has been a while since I wrote that code but my recollection is
> that it isn't necessarily a bug. That GNU copied and changed the
> meaning of -s (again provided my recollection is correct) isn't
> surprising either. I'd need to dig back to see what GNU seq had 20
> years ago when I originally wrote seq.
>
> I will agree that the -s behavior may violate POLA.
>
> The default "separator" is a newline ('\n').  The -s was to change
> this to something else but not assume that the last "separator" be
> a terminating newline.  This is why I added the -t option.
>
> The current -s option allows for using interesting separators like
> '\r' (carriage return) for a "spinning counter".
>
> Note that FreeBSD has picked up the NetBSD version of seq (and by
> that so has Apple for OSX). GNU shouldn't necessarily be considered
> as the 'standard'.

Interesting about FreeBSD and MacOS, and history.

So would you propose changing the man page to describe the traditional
BSD seq behavior instead?