Why does cat not use options the way I expect UNIX programs to use switches?
- by Chas. Owens
I have been a UNIX user for more years than I care to think about, and in that time I have been trained to expect that when contradictory switches are given to a program the last one wins. Recently I have noticed that
cat -bn file
and
cat -nb file
both use the -b option (number blank lines) over the -n option (number all lines). I get this behavior on both BSD and Linux, so I don't think it is an implementation quirk. Is this something that is specified somewhere and am I just crazy for expecting the first example to number all lines?