potential addition of sponge to POSIX

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Eric Blake wrote in
 <xhnenmzckigq5wmfmz43aoeabxxlcsusz2eflxhrosd2e56ive at pjutzahpva5l>:
 |The Austin Group is debating whether to sponsor a proposal to add
 |sponge(1) to a future edition of POSIX:
 |
 |https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1927
 |
 |I note that at present, busybox does NOT have a sponge applet; but it
 |seems like the sort of applet that could be easily added if someone
 |were to contribute it.  Many GNU/Linux systems currently have sponge
 |installed from the `moreutils` project, if that were to serve as a
 |starting point for deciding which features to match.
 |
 |Does anyone on this list have any comments on why it might be a good
 |or a bad idea for POSIX to standardize sponge?  Similarly, if busybox

I had never heard of this utility before.

 |were to implement sponge, that would make it a bit easier for POSIX
 |folks to point to multiple implementations as part of the
 |standardization process.

For CRUX-Linux there is no sponge utility available at all:

  $ prt-get help | grep fsearch
    fsearch <pattern>  show file names in footprints matching 'pattern'
  $ prt-get fsearch sponge ; echo $?
  255

Searching the internet .. if it is that, i am still ashamed of my
first (and mostly, only) pager who had to read all the data into
memory; it was fast as lightning however, and its CPU usage was
(super) niche compared to less(1).

OpenBSD does not have it.  FreeBSD had it, and one can still get
the manual via web, but it was removed in the tree -- funny:

  added in 7202e5e8f6e3f0d364dfd30fd8df5a4b8e076169 (2017-12-05)
  removed in fbc88a6f35671bd37d0a4ed68c0bb0687c364c21 (2017-12-06)

I never needed such a functionality myself (too, that is).  (But
if, at least the elder i would surely have used a temporary file
via sh(1)ell, instead of a dedicated utility.)

And what the *standard* would need, much more than that, and in my
opinion, is flock(1) (after we gained timeout(1)).
I could not write shell-based system management stuff without it.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)