Tasks for GNU textutils (listed in no particular order): tac: Set DONT_UNLINK_WHILE_OPEN when necessary. tail: add an option so that using -f on N files doesn't monopolize N file descriptors tac: add options to help handle boundary cases E.g., options to distinguish DELIM_STRING is - starter (see existing --before option) - terminator (this is what most people expect wrt NEWLINE - separator (this would make `echo -n a:b:c|tac -s:' print `c:b:a') tail: support -r option by librarifying tac and using that cut: maybe add an option to say `fields are separated by whitespace'. Of course, that isn't really necessary because you can preprocess cut's input with tr to get the same effect: echo 'a b c' |tr -s '[:blank:]' | cut -d ' ' -f 2 ------------ From: kwzh@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Karl Heuer) Subject: [textutils-1.22] [sort] feature requests To: textutils-bugs@gnu.ai.mit.edu Date: Thu, 5 Jun 97 13:06:51 -0400 [...] Another feature that I would sometimes find useful: change -c so that it will report up to N instances of disorder before bailing out, where N defaults to 1 but can be set to infinity or to some finite value by another option. (An "instance of disorder" is two adjacent lines that are malsorted; this does not imply that swapping them or removing one or both would cause the list to be sorted. (1 3 5 7 9 0 2 4 6 8) has just one instance of disorder.) ------------ Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 20:27:39 -0700 (PDT) From: Paul Rubin To: gnu@gnu.org Subject: small project suggestion Someone should rewrite the "sum" utility to give a choice of different checksum algorithms (it's poorly organized for that now). An experienced programmer could probably do it in a day or so, or it might be a good, self-contained project for someone who is just getting started. Algorithms that it should include are: -- the POSIX algorithm -- the BSD algorithm -- CRC32 algorithm (used by pkzip) -- CRC16 (used in TCP/IP) -- possibly other CRC's (like the different CCITT polynomials) -- SHA-1 and MD5 cryptographic hashes (replacing "md5sum"). and possibly: -- DSA digital signature based on secret key generated from a passphrase (prompt the user, or read an environment variable). --------------------- comm: add an option-enable check for sortedness of input files --------------------- uniq: add a more flexible key selection mechanism --------------------- Charles Randall is working on making sort more suitable and efficient for very large sets of input data.