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Date:      Tue, 21 May 1996 11:57:40 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Gary Kline <kline@tera.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Utilities and POSIX compliance....
Message-ID:  <199605211857.LAA20510@athena.tera.com>

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    Fellow BSDers,

    If you had asked me some months ago if I thought that the BSD
    utilities were largely POSIX-compliant, I would have said Yes.
    No hesitation.

    I'm finding that there are a whole bunch of the commonly used
    utilities that are not compliant.  The other day I ftp'd back
    from MIT just about every utility port that the FSF has done.
    These utilities are about as POSIX-ready as you can get.  

    `wc' is missing the -m (multibyte) flag, and I expect that 
    other of the language/locale-specific utilities are missing
    these hooks.

    Can any of the BSD gurus point me at the person or persons 
    who are working on the utilities?  Since there are around 
    300 utilities, I'm guessing that there are several people
    involved.

    I'd like to know why more of the Berkeley utilities aren't
    POSIX-compliant.  That is, why, without some minor--or even
    major--hacks, these utilities haven't been brought up to 
    standard.  The BSD kernel is A++, but not the utils... .

    Thanks much.

    gary kline

    PS: I'm _not_ asking why BSD/FreeBSD doesn't use more of the
    GNU ports... .   Terry mumbled something about licensing or
    policy or philosophy that went right over my head!  




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