Re: Dog & cat

[Pádraig Brady]

On 09/04/2013 10:14 AM, Pascal wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> cat - "concatenate files and print on the standard output" - offers -s option 
> to suppress repeated empty lines.
> 
> However, an "empty" line (visual perspective) that behave only spaces or tabs 
> is not considered as empty : one option -S that would address this scenario 
> should be added to cat...
> 
> I hope to be clear :-)

While it's a fair suggestion, I'd be against adding this functionality to cat
as it's outside of its core functionality.

Now even `cat -s` is debatable, but at least that is also implemented in FreeBSD
and is an awkward enough operation to do in sed for example:
http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/cat-_002ds.html

However a simple additional sed operation would suffice to implement -S.
Something like: sed 's/^ *$//' | cat -s

So I'd be 70:30 against implementing this.

thanks,
Pádraig.