Fedora Account System
Red Hat Associate
Red Hat Customer
The 'text' and 'binary' options to md5sum do nothing, and are confusing. Perhaps we can't remove them, in case people have scripts which use them -- but we should at least make sure that 'md5sum --help' and the man page make it clear that they do nothing on real computers.
It is not always true that they do nothing. They do nothing on GNU system - where text and binary file style is the same. More detailed informations about those options are in 'info md5sum' (in some cases is necessary to use both - man and info pages - coreutils have usually more informations on info pages). Anyway - those options are not depricated even in the latest upstream release and are used for compatibility with systems where binary and text differ(like MS-DOS). I don't think that it is useful to create patch which will only remove all the text about -t / -b option from man,info and help page and to keep it forever in Fedora package - because I doubt that will get accepted by upstream. It could be IMHO even more confusing for users(if options -t/-b are accepted, but not shown in man/info/help). So closing NOTABUG, but feel free to add your comments (maybe it could be more helpful to add something to man/help page what will say that text and binary options will have same output on GNU system).