/usr/bin/dirname - it screams to be made REALLY usable

[Frank Schruefer]

Hy,

At first:

dirname /home/merlin/whatever/../another
delivers:
/home/merlin/whatever/..

dirname /home/merlin/whatever/text\/stuff.txt
delivers:
/home/merlin/whatever/text

Then: There's no option to get absolute pathnames of the dir, aka:

cd
dirname .
delivers:
.
That's totally ok, just no option to get e.g. /home/merlin instead of . .

It's quite a shame that there's no option to request abolute or canonical path
of the dir of the specified file/dir or to get rid of relative elements.

I'd like to *change* that.

I'm thinking about a
-a (option) return abolute path
-c (") return canonical path
-s re*s*olve/*s*ubstitute relative paths (e.g. substitute .. and . in a correct 
way plus treat escape char)
-p get parent if arg is a dir itself

Well, of course dirname is not buggy, it behaves exactly as described in the 
manpage,
that's the problem ;-)
It just leaks the necessary features to be worthy of being a coreutils member 
in my opinion :-)
And in my scripts I'd need the functionality I'd like to enhance dirname with 
quite often ...

I'd like to have some kind of green light from the guys responsible here for 
the coreutils package
before I start hacking/don't wanna waste my time, maybe there's a good cause 
why it is like it is
- I can never know ;-)

So please tell me what you think of all this.

And BTW: If I make an enhancement for this proggy, do I need to file another 
copyright asignment
via snail mail like it's necessary for gcj?

--
Thanks,
  Frank Schruefer
  Erfurt, Thuringia, Germany, Europe, Earth, Known Universe, Creation