Re: [PATCH] Remove non-existing flags from _uniq

[julian <julian@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2025-01-17 22:55:09 +0100, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 6:58 AM Julian Prein <julian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Unfortunately uniq has neither the -t/--separator nor the -W/--check-fields
> > flags that are currently completed by _uniq (at least not in GNU and busybox
> > coreutils or any other implementation I could find).
>
> Web search indicates --check-fields was available in some past version
> of Debian.  A patch was submitted to GNU but never applied.

Thanks for that find, I missed that when researching. It seems as if there was
the plan to unify the interface of join, sort and uniq[^1], meaning that instead
of implementing --check-fields, uniq should rather get sort's more flexible
-k/--key flag. There were multiple unsuccessful tries, with the last one in
2019, if I'm not mistaken[^2].

> Way to difficult to get sane search results on "separator", but it is
> probably related.

I think so too. Together with -k, uniq would have also gotten
-t/--field-separator.

What does this mean for the patch I sent? I would love to see it included since
I stumble into an error for the missing flags every few months when I trust the
completion a bit too much and forgot about this again.

Thanks,
Julian

[^1]: https://lists.gnu.org/r/coreutils/2014-03/msg00004.html
[^2]: https://lists.gnu.org/r/coreutils/2019-03/msg00056.html