Re: UTF-8 support for the ancient shell toys

[Bruno Haible <haible@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 3 Nov 2001, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> This is still silent about Grep, Sort, and tr, which are
> the utilities where the non-ASCII support should be a non-trivial
> change.
>
> Basically, even after reading that page (which told me something I
> didn't know in some cases), Unicode support in basic development
> tools is still very much rudimentary.

These utilities will get UTF-8 support the same day they get general
multibyte locale support; the EUC-JP, BIG5, GB18030 users cannot be
neglected.

About grep, progress is being done by Isamu Hasegawa. But there is
certainly an opportunity to help him.

About the utilities in GNU textutils, there are patches for

   cut comm expand fold head join nl paste sort tail unexpand uniq

at

   http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnu-i18n
   ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/utf8/textutils-2.0.14.diff

from Mitsuru Chinen and me, but the maintainers (Paul Eggert and Jim
Meyering, in particular the first of both) hold up the merging
processing by
  1. saying that the patch still requires more investigation from
     their side,
  2. not attributing enough priority and time to this investigation.

Bruno
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/