Re: UTF-8 support for the ancient shell toys

[David Starner <dstarner98@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Nov 03, 2001 at 06:16:32PM +0000, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Nov 2001, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/utf8/Unicode-HOWTO-4.html
> >
> > This is still silent about Grep, Sort, and tr, which are
> > the utilities where the non-ASCII support should be a non-trivial
> > change.

sort works in most cases already, by calling strcoll. grep needs proper
Unicode regexp support, but otherwise also works (by design of UTF-8).
trs (from the konwert package) should do everything you need tr to do.
 
> Today, these tiny tools mostly lead people to write extremely inefficient
> shell scripts that spend 90% of their time in fork().

CPU time is cheap. Rewriting shell scripts in another language has
always been a good means of optimization, but for run-once or even
run-rarely, shell is fine.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each 
one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less."
- "Disciple", Stuart Davis
-
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/