Why do people screw around with basic command options?

[jkinz at kinz.org (Jeff Kinz)]

On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 05:23:42PM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Thursday 24 August 2006 5:04 pm, Gordon Marx wrote:
> > If you're relying on a non-standards-enforced behavior, wouldn't you
> > expect to have something like this happen?
> I've been involved in this stuff for years. One time, when I was responsible 
> for lint on Tru64 Unix, the lint front end script broke because the 
> standards had changed the behavior of sed. Our friend Finnbarr set me 
> straight on this. In the Linux and Unix world we had 2 conflicting Unix 
> standards, SVID and X/Open == now "The Single UNIX? Specification, Version 
> 3. In some cases the behavior of some of the commands were very different, 
> such as PS(1), or CFLOW(1). In our case we have POSIX as well as the LSB. 
> And, as Gordon points out, some old scripts reflect the behavior of 
> utilities that may not have ever been standardized. I've got scripts going 
> back to Ultrix. 

I still have my Ultrix license plates. :)  They're fixing a hole where the
rain gets in.


-- 
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
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