[ILUG] col(1)-ish tool emulating destructive ^H ?

[Brian Foster]

  | From: kevin lyda <kevin+dated+1077450067.ed4869 at ie.suberic.net>
  | Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:41:04 +0000
  | 
  | On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 03:16:11AM +0100, Brian Foster wrote:
  | >[ ... ]  thank you for the RTFM lesson.
  | 
  | you might have mentioned that you'd found the manual to be wrong.
  | you might even submit a bug report.

 *sigh*  as I said in my ill-tempered reply,
 I did not know then if the man(1) page or the
 program was in error.  hence, I had nothing
 too useful to mention, nor could I file a
 useful bug report.

 I now know.

 I investigated this issue more this afternoon,
 even testing/inspecting the 7th Edition source
 (über-source), and it is the `col(1)' man page
 which is in error:  every `col' implementation
 I could find, including various *BSDs, hardcode
 the behavior of SP (space) as non-destructive.
 in addition, the older man pages make clear `col'
 was originally intended to render nroff(1) output
 produced for ASR 35/37(?)-ish teletypes on other
 hardcopy printers, so it follows SP should be
 non-destructive.

 hence,  (1) the GNU(?) man page is in error for
 claiming otherwise (and omitting the rationale);
 and  (2) arguably, there should be an option for
 destructive-spacing.  (and after examining the
 source, I suspect that is trivial; I might even
 submit a patch?)

  |[ ... ]  did you try the script i wrote?

 not ywt actually.  thanks.  I will test it when
 time permits.  the immediate issue was fixed by
 a bit of hand-editing, so I'm now back to the
 real task.

cheers!
	-blf-
--
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