[Bug 210607] patch to bin/cat/cat.c to align output between when invoked with -be & -ne flags

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Fri Aug 5 15:28:54 UTC 2016


https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=210607

--- Comment #3 from John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> ---
(In reply to Sevan Janiyan from comment #2)
1) The 'BSD' output from CSRG is the current one, not NetBSD's recent change. 
The other output has been in place for 35 years.  There has to be a compelling
reason to change it vs the tradeoff of breaking existing scripts and reducing
compatibility with other systems.  'cat' on OS X follows the current output as
well (inherited from BSD of course).

2) The language is not clear (and I'd be fine with clarifying it), but what you
are changing is to have 'cat -be' insert extra leading blankspace for blank
lines, but 'cat -b' does not.  That seems far less intuitive to me from any of
the descriptions.  It seems more consistent for 'cat -b' to always include
leading blankspace or to never include, not to only do it for '-e'.

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