"Nelson H. F. Beebe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I notice that the output of stat from coreutils-5.1.2 produces a blank > line (marked by ---> below) at the end of its report: > > 203 eilat::coreutils-5.1.2.p1> /usr/local/bin/stat /bin/true > File: `/bin/true' > Size: 312 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 65536 regular file > Device: eeh/238d Inode: 380 Links: 1 > Access: (0755/-rwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ sys) > Access: 2003-12-09 09:02:56.572619600 -0700 > Modify: 1999-11-04 12:07:38.887783200 -0700 > Change: 1999-11-04 12:07:38.888253600 -0700 > ---> > 204 eilat::coreutils-5.1.2.p1> > > Spurious empty trailing lines are atypical of GNU and Unix software, > so perhaps the empty line should be eliminated.
Yes, it should. Thank you. That's easy/safe to fix, so I'll do it now. However, this raises the issue of a little wart in stat: even though one may specify the --format=FORMAT, stat always outputs a trailing newline. IMHO, it'd be better to have stat omit the default trailing newline with a user-supplied FORMAT. It might even be worthwhile to interpret `\n', \t, \\, etc. Although it's been around for a while, stat is a relatively new addition to coreutils. Perhaps now is the best time to make such a change. I can see that it might well cause trouble in applications that require the automatically-supplied trailing newline, but there may not be too many, yet, and the documentation is silent on the matter, so it's not as if they're relying on a published interface... Comments welcome. Bear in mind that making such a change will become only harder the longer we wait. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
