Re: [PATCH] split: --chunks option

[Jim Meyering]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 14/12/09 21:04, Chen Guo wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>      I'm about to implement everything we discussed. One thing I want to 
>> double check is, since we have --number-lines=x/y and --number-bytes=x/y as 
>> the long options, obviously we can't just use -n for the short option.

Hi Chen,

Glad to hear you're still working on this.
I hope the end-of-term business went well.

>>      So would it be acceptable to do -nb=x/y and -nl=x/y? This seems the 
>> most intuitive to me, but I can see where this would cause confusion with 
>> the -b and -l options. What do you guys think?

It's good to make long option names consistent between tools,
and to avoid long, common prefixes like "--number-".
Have you considered --bytes and --lines, like tail has?

> You can't do -nl unfortunately.
> You could just add 1 new option: -n --number
> This could then be used like:
>
> -n bytes:4  => bytes per file = size/number
> -n 4        => ditto

Since tail's -n means --lines, making "split -n 4" mean "bytes"
would be confusing.

Using a short option name like -n *may* be fine,
but you have to do a survey of all other vendor
versions of split to ensure that none of them
provide an -n option.

> -n lines:4  => ditto but don't split lines