fix uniq -c [LWN.net]

fix uniq -c

Posted Feb 17, 2025 19:18 UTC (Mon) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248)
In reply to: fix uniq -c by stijn
Parent article: Rewriting essential Linux packages in Rust

Alright, I think I understand where you're coming from a lot better now. It wasn't just your title, though; in your first comment you wrote:

> It is quite puzzling that Richard Stallman let this program loose on the world as it violates usual Unix well-behavedness of textual interfaces.

And to that my argument was that first and foremost `uniq -c` was most likely designed to be easy to read by humans. By that metric it is very much well-behaved & doesn't violate anything. Furthermore, even with it being designed to be human-readable its output is actually useable as-is by a lot of other traditional Unix programs, making it arguably even less of a "wrong" that has to be "righted" (your choice of words, again from your first post). Apart from awk & bash which I mentioned earlier, "sort -n" works fine as well.

to post comments

fix uniq -c

Posted Feb 17, 2025 20:15 UTC (Mon) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link]

I let a pointless/misdirected rhetorical flourish get the better of me again. I understand the history - and view it as beneficial to strive towards (recasting it from wrong/right) to make outputs (tuples/tables) preferably by default composable or at least add options to do that without assumptions about white-space padding. The table format (mysql dump, spreadsheet, dataframe) is pervasive and super useful. In the right setup shell pipelines can do amazing things with them. Working in those type of table environments has made the various stripes of unix white-space padding and stripping jar with me.