I note that https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696699/utilities/cut.html says: *> The elements in list can be repeated, can overlap, and can be specified in any order, but the bytes, characters, or fields selected shall be written in the order of the input data.*
The intention behind this is so that cut can be implemented as a small state machine using just getchar, putchar, and a counter. This avoids copying via a line buffer, and that implies there should be no line-length limit. So I'm a bit surprised that any kind of "getline" is used by the loadable version. -Martin PS: Other equivalent implementations are possible that can also avoid the stdio buffer copies.
