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Date:      Wed, 9 Jun 2004 18:26:43 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        "Cyrille Lefevre" <clefevre-lists@9online.fr>, <arch@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Change to "kludge option processing" in /bin/ps
Message-ID:  <p0602044ebced3d3afbd0@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <p0602042fbce693792f92@[128.113.24.47]>
References:  <200406041933.i54JX9kj040764@mail.gits.dyndns.org> <p0602042fbce693792f92@[128.113.24.47]>

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At 5:34 PM -0400 6/4/04, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>At 10:13 PM +0200 6/3/04, Cyrille Lefevre wrote:
>>
>>ok, let's try another issue :
>>
>># ps -G " nobody "
>>   PID  TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
>>75483 con- S      0:10.97 /usr/local/sbin/junkbuster configfile
>># ps -G ,nobody,
>>ps: Invalid (zero-length) group name
>>ps: Invalid (zero-length) group name
>># ps -G ,
>>ps: Invalid (zero-length) group name
>>ps: Invalid (zero-length) group name
>
>
>>why do you make a difference while parsing commas and spaces ?

When I first read this, I thought you meant that my latest `ps' was
not accepting blanks somewhere that it should have.

Now that I read it closer, it seems that you want me to treat a
comma the same as a blank.  The spec that I am reading from talks
about "in the form of a <blank> or comma-separated list".  To me,
that means "a list which is separated by one or more spaces or
tabs, or by a comma".  Thus, one comma must be a separator between
two elements in a list.

So, `ps -G ,nobody,' is a list with three elements, two of which
are null.  Null elements are an error.  So, you get two error
messages.  As I sit here right now, I still think that is the
correct and reasonable behavior, so I have no plans to change it.

I can see that it could be argued that leading or trailing blanks
should also be considered a separator, and should also cause an
error.  I prefer the present behavior, but I will change that to
generate an error if people really think it should be.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu



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