Re: weird interaction between builtin cat and trap

[Chet Ramey]

On 4/14/22 6:08 PM, Peng Yu wrote:

> Shouldn't you make the builtin cat behave the same as the external
> cat? 

It already doesn't: it has no options and I'm uninterested in adding any.

> I'd expect the built-in command to be a drop-in replacement of
> the corresponding external command, as using builtin is to speed up
> the bash program but not to change its behavior.

In most cases, where the behavior is standardized, that's the case, but I
wrote the builtin cat as an homage to Pike's "cat -v considered harmful"
paper (http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf).

> https://simplicable.com/new/bug-vs-feature
> - Bug: Something that can be reasonably viewed as a problem based on
> current requirements....
> - Feature: Something that hasn't been requested in current requirements....
>
> According to the above definition of bug vs feature, it should be
> considered as a bug meaning the behavior is not consistent with the
> corresponding external program.

You presume too much about the "current requirements."

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/