> That's what "%(trailers:only)" does (even if the original separator was > something else). It also trims any extra whitespace. Ooh, this is good to know: thanks. (I had found `print_tok_val` in `trailer.c` and assumed that this was the only place with the output logic, but I now see that `format_trailer_info` also exists in the same file.) > IMHO this is a bug in --parse. It was always meant to give sane, > normalized output Okay; this is good to hear. In that case, what would you think about changing `interpret-trailers` as a whole to always emit colons? (Note that the command is already lossy: even with no flags, it replaces each separator character with the first character of `trailer.separators`.) This has the advantage that we avoid adding a configuration option of dubious value—it’s not clear to me why a user would actually _want_ to change the separator to anything other than a colon. The patch should be quite simple, too (only tested lightly on my machine): diff --git a/trailer.c b/trailer.c index 0796f326b3..722040e48c 100644 --- a/trailer.c +++ b/trailer.c @@ -156,7 +156,7 @@ static void print_tok_val(FILE *outfile, const char *tok, const char *val) if (strchr(separators, c)) fprintf(outfile, "%s%s\n", tok, val); else - fprintf(outfile, "%s%c %s\n", tok, separators[0], val); + fprintf(outfile, "%s: %s\n", tok, val); } Is this veering too much from “bug fix” toward “backward-incompatible behavior change” for your comfort? I agree that either this or your (1) and (2) would eliminate the need for `-z`, which is nice. Best, WC