Re: POSIX conformance in coreutils

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Jan 12,  9:19am, Vin Shelton wrote:
} Subject: Re: POSIX conformance in coreutils
}
} 'Standards conformance' section of the coreutils info says:
} 
}   Newer versions of POSIX are occasionally incompatible with older
}   versions.  For example, older versions of POSIX required the command
}   `sort +1' to sort based on the second and succeeding fields in each
}   input line, but starting with POSIX 1003.1-2001 the same command is
}   required to sort the file named `+1', and you must instead use the
}   command `sort -k 2' to get the field-based sort.

This is, by the way, only the GNU coreutils maintainer's interpretation
of the POSIX requirements; there was quite a lengthy argument about this
on the austin-group mailing list back in October 2004 or so, though I
don't recall whether an "official" resolution was ever approved.  At the
least there was not an agreement that this behavior really is required,
so far as I could tell.