seq - Suggestion: Define dots as standard decimal separator, using locale as optional

[Felix Neuper]

Hi,


Recently I stumbled upon seq's behaviour of using the floating point 
separator as defined in the current locale.

Regarding portability of scripts and standard practice in most data 
processing environments, I would kindly suggest to define usage of dots 
as standard behaviour and loading locale settings only when requested 
via an option (e.g. -l, --locale).

Alternatively one could allow the -f option to define the separator ( -f 
%1.2f still gave commas for a German locale) or base the output on the 
input format ( the input issue has been addressed before: 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2014-02/msg00044.html ).

Unfortunately the locale-dependency in seq's behaviour is also not 
mentioned in any manual, making error tracking a hard time.


Apart from that I also noticed odd behaviour with bad locale settings: 
With LANG=en_US (erroneous) and LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8, output format is 
mixed in specific cases

seq 0.1 0.2 1.3
0.1
0.3
0.5
0.7
0.9
1.1
1,3

(note the comma in the last line)

versus

seq 0.1 0.2 1.4
0.1
0.3
0.5
0.7
0.9
1.1
1.3

A comma in the last line is also observed for e.g. seq 0.1 0.3 1.9

While one should not have badly configured locales, this behaviour seems 
dangerous to me.


Using version 8.28 on Mint 19.1


Thanks for maintaining these utils.


Best regards,


Felix Neuper

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