[illumos-Developer] sed -i behavior - question

[Joerg Schilling]

"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at damore.org> wrote:

> If you don't use sed, or care about it, delete this message.
>
> The question centers around "-i" in our implementation of sed.  While we 
> have a "-i" flag, it *assumes* a suffix (extension) will follow it.  The 
> next argument is taken as such unconditionally.  (E.g. it uses i: in 
> getopt string.)
>
> Now GNU sed has the SUFFIX as optional.  It looks at the next string and 
> tries to make a decision based on whether the next option starts with a 
> "-" or not.   This feels far "tar-ish", unfortunately, and violates the 
> CLIP (and I think, the POSIX rules too.)

The only clean way to implement optional option-Arguments is to require the 
arguments to directly (without space) follow the option.

Other gimmicks (like the one mentioned above, or the arg reordering done by GNU 
getopt) are a violation of the POSIX CLI base guidelines.

Jörg

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