Subject: Re: cut - lack of --merge-delimiters option

From: Leo Lopes <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2010 12:06:35 +1100

Hi Folks,

Sorry to revive a 2-year old thread, but the rest of the thread is easy to find.

Exec summary: a user wanted a merge delimiters options, and the
discussion kind of digressed to "there is a more clever way to do it",
and "why should this be in cut"?

The responses in the thread as to why this feature isn't yet in cut
are reasonable for the issues raised there. However, the most
important (IMHO) use case wasn't considered:

The --merge-delimiters (or -m) feature should be part of cut because
people have come to expect that behavior from a column selector. Every
major application has this option. The fact that cut doesn't have the
feature is not a sign of good design, but rather historical accident.
When people don't find the feature, search for it, then find the
response "how come you don't know how to use awk and don't know this
special feature of ls?" it violates the principle of least surprise
among other things.

Cheers,
Leo.