On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 9:27 AM, Almer S. Tigelaar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > I have been using the 'wc' program (version 5.97) to manually verify > some counts outputted by a component part of an application I am > developing. > > I noticed that: > echo "12345" | wc -m > Gives me '6' as output. But I don't entirely understand why. > > On multi-line input 'wc' seems to add '1' to the character count in each > sentence. One would say then that this '1' is caused by counting > 'invisible' newline characters, but there is no newline in the example > above. > > This off-by-one is probably intended behaviour (even though I am curious > to find out why). I would expect something about this to be listed in > the man page of 'wc', but could not find it there.
Its counting the trailing newline. $ echo "12345" | wc -m 6 $ printf "12345\n" | wc -m 6 $ printf "12345" | wc -m 5 $ echo -n "12345" | wc -m 5 Brock _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
