findutils & textutils updates/bug fixes

[Padraig Brady]

Hi,
I've a few small patches here which I think are definitely required.

1: findutils

 a: find (%D printf specifier added) which prints the device id
associated
    with a file. This (in conjunction with the inode number) allows you
    to uniquely identify any file on the system, which is
useful/required
    for many applications.

 b: xargs doesn't ignore "empty" arguments when -0 used (I.E. '\0' is
delimiter).
    You can test this like:

    address@hidden:~$ echo -ne "1\n\n\n2" | xargs -n1 | od -t x1
    0000000 31 0a 32 0a
    address@hidden:~$ echo -ne "1\000\000\0002" | xargs -0 -n1 | od
-t x1
    0000000 31 0a 0a 0a 32 0a

    As you can see the first command works as expected, whereas the
second doesn't.
    In summary multiple consequtive '\0's should be squeezed to 1 '\0'

 c: Related to b: xargs should have an option to group arguments passed
to commands
    by 2 or more delimeters, i.e: you should be able to do:

    address@hidden:~$ echo -ne "1\n2\n3\n\na\nb\nc\n" | xargs -nn
    1 2 3
    a b c
    address@hidden:~$

2: textutils

 a: uniq should print a blank line after every group of duplicates. I.E.
when you
    use the -D option to print duplicate lines a blank line should be
printed,
    otherwise this info is lost, and the output can't be further
processed
    by anything. e.g.:

    address@hidden:~$ echo -ne "1\n2\n2\n3\n4\n4\n" | uniq -Db
    2
    2

    4
    4
    address@hidden:~$

 b: uniq should have the same options for selecting columns to
ignore/process like sort.
    Obviously this is not trivial and so I haven't a patch for this ;-)

I'm not on the list, and so would appreciate a direct reply.
thanks,

Padraig.