RE: coreutils feature requests?

[Nellis, Kenneth]

From: Steeve McCauley
> I can't believe I'd never thought of reordering output columns like this.  
> FWIW, I agree that another option should be used to prevent issues with 
> backward compatibility.
> 
> $ echo 1,2,3,4,5,6 | cut -d, -f3,5,2
> 2,3,5
> 
> $ echo 1,2,3,4,5,6 | cut -d, -f3,5,2 -o
> 3,5,2
> Should this be extended to character output as well?
> echo output | cut -c6,4,2 -o
> tpu
> 

Absolutely! It would be expected behavior (IMHO). I see no reason not to.

In addition, so that scripts can work across platforms, I (strongly) recommend 
that a cut-specific environment variable be defined to allow specifying the
field ordering behavior. In that way my QNX 4 script (whose cut would balk at
the -o option) would work with Gnu. One possibility:

CUT_OPTIONS=-o

--Ken Nellis