bug#7455: cut - lack of --merge-delimiters option

[Pádraig Brady]

On 21/11/10 01:06, Leo Lopes wrote:
> 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.

This pops up every so often:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-09/msg00165.html

That thread, considered using:  cut -d '[:blank:]'
but this was deemed sufficient: tr -s '[:blank:]' ' ' | cut -d ' '

I.E. it's marginal. However considering also that it's
awkward currently to parse /proc/partitions for e.g.
because it has leading blanks.
So perhaps if we did support the above, it could
have the extra functionality of ignoring leading blanks?

cheers,
Pádraig.