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| -rw-r--r-- | doc/textutils.texi | 20 |
1 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/textutils.texi b/doc/textutils.texi index ecfd63301..432d63639 100644 --- a/doc/textutils.texi +++ b/doc/textutils.texi @@ -1839,6 +1839,16 @@ consists of the line between @var{pos1} and @var{pos2} (or the end of the line, if @var{pos2} is omitted), inclusive. Fields and character positions are numbered starting with 1. See below. +@item -z +@opindex -z +@cindex sort zero-terminated lines +Treat the input as a set of lines, each terminated by a zero byte (@sc{ASCII} +@sc{NUL} (Null) character) instead of a @sc{ASCII} @sc{LF} (Line Feed.) +This option can be useful in conjunction with @samp{perl -0} or +@samp{find -print0} and @samp{xargs -0} which do the same in order to +reliably handle arbitrary pathnames (even those which contain Line Feed +characters.) + @item +@var{pos1}[-@var{pos2}] The obsolete, traditional option for specifying a sort field. The field consists of the line between @var{pos1} and up to but @emph{not including} @@ -1940,6 +1950,16 @@ An alternative is to use the global numeric modifier @samp{-n}. sort -t : -n -k 5b,5 -k 3,3 /etc/passwd @end example +@item +Generate a tags file in case insensitive sorted order. +@example +find src -type f -print0 | sort -t / -z -f | xargs -0 etags --append +@end example + +The use of @samp{-print0}, @samp{-z}, and @samp{-0} in this case mean +that pathnames that contain Line Feed characters will not get broken up +by the sort operation. + Finally, to ignore both leading and trailing white space, you could have applied the @samp{b} modifier to the field-end specifier for the first key, |