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bug#21356: BUG: split shorter version of '--numeric-suffixes' give error
From: |
Pádraig Brady |
Subject: |
bug#21356: BUG: split shorter version of '--numeric-suffixes' give error |
Date: |
Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:18:51 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.6.0 |
On 27/08/15 13:06, Stephane Chazelas wrote:
> 2015-08-27 00:05:49 +0100, Pádraig Brady:
> [...]
>>> $ split -n10 -a4 -d5 echo.txt
>>> split: cannot split in more than one way
>>> Try 'split --help' for more information.
>>>
>>> where as using longer option for `-d` i.e. `--numeric-suffixes` works fine.
>>>
>>> $ split -n10 -a4 --numeric-suffixes=5 echo.txt
>>>
>>>
>>> FYI: I had asked it on unix.stackexchange as well, for reference
>>> http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/225704/17265
>>
>> -d can't take an _optional_ argument for backwards compat
>> and operational reasons. I.E. generally short options
>> can't take an optional argument due to ambiguities that would introduce.
>>
>> The particular ambiguity in this case is that -d5 is equivalent
>> to -d -5, which is equivalent to -d -l5, hence the error.
> [...]
>
> Note that GNU getopt supports short options with optional
> arguments (though doesn't allow an empty argument like the long
> option version).
>
> The split documentation could be improved to avoid this kind of
> confusion:
>
> info page:
>
> `-l LINES'
> `--lines=LINES'
> Put LINES lines of INPUT into each output file.
>
> For compatibility `split' also supports an obsolete option syntax
> `-LINES'. New scripts should use `-l LINES' instead.
> [...]
> `-d'
> `--numeric-suffixes[=FROM]'
> Use digits in suffixes rather than lower-case letters. The
> numerical suffix counts from FROM if specified, 0 otherwise. Note
> specifying a FROM value also disables the default auto suffix
> length expansion described above, and so you may also want to
> specify `-a' to allow suffixes beyond `99'.
>
> It's easy to miss that it's not `-d[FROM]` here. A note along
> these lines could help:
>
> "Note that the FROM value can only be specified with the long
> option from."
Done at:
http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=da5505dd7f
I can't think of any suitably terse improvements for the man page.
thanks,
Pádraig.