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freebsd/contrib/gnu-sort/TODO
2002-06-08 07:47:23 +00:00

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Tasks for GNU textutils (listed in no particular order):
write texinfo documentation for sha1sum
Something that I would really appreciate is if someone would run the
Open Group's VSC-lite test suite against the fileutils and textutils
and report the failures.
http://www.opengroup.org/testing/downloads/vsclite.html
I've been meaning to do it myself for months, but haven't found the time.
There's a bit of set-up required, some of which requires root access, e.g.,
to create a few test user accounts and some test groups.
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uniq: remove support for obsolescent +N syntax
add tests for od
add some endian-aware tests for od
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.)
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Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 20:27:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: Paul Rubin <phr@netcom.com>
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).
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comm: add an option-enable check for sortedness of input files
---------------------
uniq: add a more flexible key selection mechanism
---------------------
Charles Randall <crandall@matchlogic.com>
is working on making sort more suitable and efficient for very
large sets of input data.