Flac - Oct 2014 - Way to decode specific channel(s) flac --decode?

Is there a way to decode user-specified channel(s) using the flac 
command-line utility?

I tried:

$ flac --decode --output-name=1.wav --channels=1 input.flac
ERROR: --channels not allowed with --decode
Type "flac" for a usage summary or "flac --help" for all
options

It appears that using the --channels option is simply disallowed with 
--decode, or maybe I'm totally misusing --channels without realizing it 
(in which case I welcome correction).

Thanks for your help.

Op 01-10-14 om 02:09 schreef J.B. Nicholson-Owens:
> Is there a way to decode user-specified channel(s) using the flac
> command-line utility?
No, there is not. To make sure the encoding and decoding 
processes are lossless, there are no switches like these. You 
will have to use another program, like SoX, to do this.

Martijn van Beurden wrote:
> No, there is not. To make sure the encoding and decoding
> processes are lossless, there are no switches like these. You
> will have to use another program, like SoX, to do this.
I was not aware this behavior was considered lossy and I didn't know 
that only lossless encoding and decoding was a goal. Specifically, I 
thought extracting only some channels from a FLAC file would be okay to 
expect flac to do given the other lossy encoding and decoding options 
already in flac such as --skip (to skip over samples) and --until (for 
stopping at a given sample) which each allow extracting only some 
samples, and --apply-replaygain-which-is-not-lossless. None of these 
options are marked as deprecated in the documentation and two of them 
aren't marked as lossy.