This is a particularly interesting program.
I managed to implement everything according to POSIX except how
octal escapes are specified in the standard, which is yet another
format compared to the one demanded for tr(1).
This not only confuses people, it also adds unnecessary cruft
for no real gain.
So in order to be able to use unescape() easily and for consistency,
I used our initial format \o[oo] instead of \0[ooo].
Marked as optional is UTF-8 support for %c in the POSIX specification.
Given how well-developed libutf has become, doing this here was more
or less trivial, putting us yet again ahead of the competition.
and mark it as finished in the README.
Specifically, add a small section on the compression flags, which
are basically an infected GNU limb which should be removed from
the face of the earth as soon as possible.
The algorithm had some areas which had potential for improvement.
This should make cmp(1) faster.
There have been changes to behaviour as well:
1) If argv[0] and argv[1] are the same, cmp(1) returns Same.
2) POSIX specifies the format of the difference-message to be:
"%s %s differ: char %d, line %d\n", file1, file2,
<byte number>, <line number>
However, as cmp(1) operates on bytes, not characters, I changed
it to
"%s %s differ: byte %d, line %d\n", file1, file2,
<byte number>, <line number>
This is one example where the standard just keeps the old format
for backwards-compatibility. As this is harmful, this change
makes sense in the sense of consistentcy (and because we take
the difference of char and byte very seriously in sbase, as
opposed to GNU coreutils).
The manpage has been annotated, reflecting the second change, and
sections shortened where possible.
Thus I marked cmp(1) as finished in README.
Use size_t for all counts, fix the manpage and refactor the code.
Here's yet another place where GNU coreutils fail:
sbase:
$ echo "GNU/Turd sucks" | wc -cm
15
coreutils:
$ echo "GNU/Turd sucks" | wc -cm
15 15
Take a bloody guess which behaviour is correct[0].
[0]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009604499/utilities/wc.html