Normally I would guess to post each item in a separate
email, to maintain proper threads. But I'm not sure
if any of this is right to post in this list, so
I didn't want to clutter up the list. If this is
the right content for this list, please post any
follow-ups in in their own threads? (Or I can
repost as many separate posts.)
-Wayne Pollock
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Allow sleep(1) sub-second times
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Define awk's rand() function more completely; it is
currently the only user-level command that can generate
random numbers.
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Add/define shell RANDOM as lcg type
Add/define /dev/random and /dev/urandom as blocking
and suitable for cryptographic uses, and as non-blocking
suitable for other uses.
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Define locale names as:
a pathname containing slashes
locale.<string> # for non-standard or locally defined names,
with some appropriate limits on <string>
"POSIX"
"C"
or a name in the format:
language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]
where "language" is an ISO 639 language code,
"territory" is an ISO 3166 country code,
"codeset" is a character set identifier like
"ISO-8859-1" or "UTF-8", and
"modifier" is any string up up to X characters from
the POSIX portable character set.
One problem is there is no standard list of codesets.
The IANA maintains a list at
www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets
but it is not definitive nor does it include many
commonly used charset names. For example "utf8" is
not listed as an alias of "UTF-8", but Fedora Linux
systems (and presumably other Gnu-based systems) don't include
"*.UTF-8" in the list of supported locales! "*.utf8" locale
names are used (according to the output of "locale -a").
Sun defines the IANA list as the official JRE list for Java.
Maybe it's time for a living POSIX standard for this?
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tar options for all extended attributes plus ACLs. (Currently
only "star" supports this reliably on all systems, using
non-standard archive type and other options. pax was supposed
to but it doesn't.)
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Move documentation from the obscure notes location (I forget now
where I found this) to the I/O redirection page, that
using ">" redirection is an atomic "test and create if missing"
operation when noclobber mode is set.
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Add a mktemp(1) utility
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read(1) clarification of backslash behavior:
In read(1) a backslash <newline> is removed
from the input regardless of the IFS setting.
Otherwise a backslash escapes the word
separators specified by the IFS setting.
A backslash followed by any other character
results in implementation defined [or unspecified ?]
behavior.
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pathname expansion
There is a readlink sys call defined, but no
user-level commands for this. I suggest adopting
Gnu readlink(1) as a starting point.
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date(1) command extension to format a given date ("-d date").
Also a format conversion specs for RFC-2822 and RFC-3339
formats.
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Additional find(1) search criteria, for tasks that are difficult
or impossible with the current limited set of criteria.
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