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From: seebs AT plethora DOT net (Peter Seebach)
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Reply-To: seebs AT plethora DOT net (Peter Seebach)
Subject: getopts, POSIX, and the sh(1) man page
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 22:03:36 -0600

Shouldn't the sh(1) man page mention the lack of getopts, rather than
documenting a feature which apparently got taken out?

For that matter, it seems to me that taking out a core POSIX feature is not
a very good way to make a shell smaller.  getopts(1) was standardized because
it's VERY USEFUL.  A script that calls #!/bin/sh can, on any POSIX system,
expect getopts(1) to be available.  This is a portability problem; requiring
a user to ask for bash to get a standard POSIX feature is misleading at
best.  The implementation, which *did* exist at one point, can't have been
all *THAT* big.  Or maybe it should just get added to /bin.  Looking at the
code in another copy of ash, this is just plain not a big enough chunk of
code to be worth taking out.

-s

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