Has CR/LF and cat problem with textutils-2.0 been solved?

[Erik Nolte]

> I don't think cat should strip \r's on input; I quite often use cat to
> concatenate binary data :-)
>
> However *all* shells (and not only bash) *must* read the standard output
of
> command expansion (backtick) in *text* mode, as it *does* expect text and
is
> *not* willing to handle binary data there.
>
> The problem here is thus IMNSHO in cat but in the shell, so *please* don't
> feed the cat with a new bug :-)

I agree.  Bash should do the CR-LF conversion for both forms of command
output expansion: `cmd` and $(cmd).  Sh should do the conversion for the
backticks form.

It's interesting that cat was placed in the line-oriented textutils package
rather than something like fileutils or shellutils.  But then again so was
od and the checksum utilities like sum and md5sum.

What cat's -B option for?  Since it's not in the FSF documentation, I
thought it was a cygwin addition that forced cat to *not* do the LF to CR-LF
output translation.  To me it implies that cat is reading and writing in
textmode, not binmode.

Since it will take a while to fix all the shells, should a --text flag be
added to cat?  I know it's ugly, but it saves people the trouble of having
to find a B20.1 version of cat.

- Erik


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