Matthew Woehlke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well, yes, I would hope so. If you can't write 'a + b' in your program, > something is wrong ;-). (Use case is of course e.g. scripts where the > beginning line is not known in advance, but you know you want N lines > total.)
Am I right assuming you mean something like '-20,+3' ? > '-N' is already a fairly common convention, so I don't expect problems. > And I stole '+N' from sed, of course :-). OK. > Ok. (An alternative, if sed-like format wins, would of course be '5,$', > but '5,-0' is fine.) I'm a bit hesitant to make it look too much like sed. And I must correct myself here: "1,-1" is valid, whereas "1,-0" isn't. > I was asking you :-). Personally I think printing lines backwards is > probably not so good an idea, so I would either match only the first > line, or else print a warning to stderr. I think we should disallow it entirely. Worry later about the details. > Anyway '5,2' was just an > "obvious" example; I would expect this to be more likely with a range > like '5,-5' on input with fewer than nine lines. Agreed (except s/nine/ten/). _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
