Dear Pádraig,
Thank you for the excellent explanation. Specifically, "I.e. input _is_ sent
character at a time rather than line at a time," is enlightening.
Kaz Kylheku gave a helpful response earlier, but I forgot to cc coreutils in my response
to him. He suggested that it might be acceptable to add a "cursescbreak"
option, but that is obviously entirely upto the maintainers. I could try working on this
if you like, and I had signed a set of copyright assignment forms for FSF earlier for a
glibc contribution, which ended up not happening since I started working at a different
university. Therefore, I might have to do that again (is it required?).
Doing this might be useful for users who expect curses like behavior without
having to worry about *what
exactly* needs to be done to get curses like behavior (such as clearing ICRNL).