Chapter 8. Printing Commands

8.1. Printing Commands

An LSB conforming implementation shall provide the commands and utilities as described in Table 8-1, with at least the behavior described as mandatory in the referenced underlying specification, with the following exceptions:

  1. If any operand (except one which follows --) starts with a hyphen, the behavior is unspecified.

    Rationale (Informative): Applications should place options before operands, or use --, as needed. This text is needed because, by default, GNU option parsing differs from POSIX, unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. For example, ls . -a in GNU ls means to list the current directory, showing all files (that is, "." is an operand and -a is an option). In POSIX, "." and -a are both operands, and the command means to list the current directory, and also the file named -a. Suggesting that applications rely on the setting of the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable, or try to set it, seems worse than just asking the applications to invoke commands in ways which work with either the POSIX or GNU behaviors.

Table 8-1. Commands And Utilities

foomatic-rip [1]gs [1]   

Referenced Specification(s)