Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 08:17:24 -0700 From: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> To: Clark Gaylord <gaylord@gaylord.async.vt.edu> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: syslogd and syslog.conf Message-ID: <199810151517.IAA03759@austin.polstra.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 15 Oct 1998 10:08:20 EDT." <199810151408.KAA22591@gaylord.async.vt.edu>
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> > This isn't a new feature, it's a long-overdue bug fix. > > I could only agree if we say in very large, bold letters: TABS ARE > THE STANDARD, USUAL FORMAT. USE SPACE AT YOUR OWN PERIL. Oh, puh-leeeze! This is mountain-out-of-molehill. BSDI and probably most other unixes accept spaces too. So I would argue that tabs are _not_ the standard format. They are the historical broken format, which is something quite different. Also, any sysadmin who blindly copies a /etc file from one OS to a different OS deserves what he gets. Should we also warn users not to rename the file to SYSLOG.INI and try to use it on their Windows NT machines? ;-) > No, more seriously, tab-delimited is the usual means of formatting a > text "database" file Not in Unix. Go have a look. The usual convention is linear whitespace, which means a sequence of one or more tabs or spaces. > I don't know that a lot of sysadmins actually try to make sense of > syslogd.conf, If by "make sense of" you mean "parse with a program" then I doubt you'll find very many, if you find even one. > but in general if you have a fixed number of fields of data that > require delimiting, tab and colon are the usual delimiters; Not in Unix. Whitespace and colon. > using space begs one to use multiple spaces, and then you run into > having to consider "[ ]+" or, worse yet " [ ]*", when parsing said > file. But multiple tabs are already allowed in syslog.conf. John -- John Polstra jdp@polstra.com John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. Seattle, Washington USA "Self-knowledge is always bad news." -- John Barth To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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