small bug in who(1) of SVR3

[John F Haugh II]

In article <14818 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>Of course the actual bug is that "who" has no business being designed
>this way.  If you want columnation, it is trivial (who|6, for example),
>as is a user count (who|wc).  Building such functionality into the
>"who" command is so much against UNIX design principles that I have to
>wonder who could have approved such features.

This makes the assumption that the initial design of "who" was perfect
in the first place.  It is clear (to me, at least) that an unadorned
"who" should tell you exactly what it does.  However, there are sufficient
reasons for more or less information to be given.  Why should I be forced
to 1) write a new command (ala "users") or 2) use pipes (ala "who | 
cut -d' ' -f1 | pr -6 -l1) to get the same results as "who -q"?

The real problem comes in when the information is presented in a form
that requires special processing to be useful, as does the output of
"who -q".  That last line serves little use when contrasted against
the purpose of the who command, which is "Lists who is on the system".

Perhaps Doug is right - perhaps one command should have one narrowly
defined purpose.  On the other hand, what is preventing "users" from
being a simple link to "who -q"?
-- 
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