Commands and Utilities Proposal, 0.2

[Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo]

Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

> > The LSB mail command combines the specifications of UNIX98's mail and
> > mailx commands, providing the mailx functionality whenever the two
> 
> Humm
> > definitions conflict. This program must be available as both mail and
> > mailx.
> 
> Several scripts that fire mail through web servers rely on
> precise semantics including the relevant ~ escape patterns to know how to 
> handle security aspects with quoting. The Linux world has adapted to this
> do we wish to follow existing Linux here. Just a question ?

Shouldn't be much of a problem. mail is quite simplistic (4 pages in
Issue 5 vs. 20 pages for mailx), and doesn't have any ~ escapes. The
only conflicts are where mailx in fact provides an enhanced version of
the mail command, and most scripts depend on the funcionality
described. Basically, mailx leaves off a couple of arguments that
might be used by legacy scripts depending on some of the old mail
functionality (e.g. -p or -t), while most scripts actually depend on
mailx funcionality from mail. I believe the BSD mailx acts like this
already, and I know that the GNU mailutils mailx program will (since
I'm writing it).

-- 
Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo - jkaivo at ndn.net - http://jakob.kaivo.net/