Jason Thorpe writes:
> On Sat, 26 Oct 1996 14:34:58 -0700 (PDT) 
>  Jeremy Cooper <jeremy@broder.com> wrote:
> 
>  > Why not check it stdout is a tty?  If not, default to the old style
>  > output.
> 
> On the surface, that seems like a good idea... however, consider the
> case of the dailies... you might want them to look pretty there, but
> there's not a tty associated with that process when they go off.
> 
> I'm inclined to say "Pretty by default, add a flag to specify one-row
> output."

Why not the other way (a la '-k'). Don't change the default output
from the Posix(?) mode of one line per filesystem, 512 bytes per
block.

We have backup software that parses the posix output of df (or gdf on
machines that don't do posix output), and allocate filesystems amongst
the available writable tape drives for that session. Changing df means
we have to change the software.

I'm sure other people have got scripts that will be broken by the
change of the default.

Do the change, just make it activated by an option.