Leif LeBaron <this <at> bb9.org> writes: Hello Leif,
> > > Why do you think it's a bug? > > I imagine the insertion of leading spaces was deliberate, but I refer to it as bug because it has already been > registered as such in your bug tracker, and also for the following reasons. > > - It appears to be undocumented (I checked both, man and info pages). Would you care to submit a documentation patch? > > - It appears to violate susv3 > (<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/uniq.html>) which clearly states: That link is outdated (from POSIX 2001); the latest text (from POSIX 2008) is here: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/uniq.html But the text you quoted is still the same across the two releases: > > If the -c option is specified, the output file shall be empty or each line shall be of the form: > "%d %s", <number of duplicates>, <line> The thing you are missing, however, are these additional lines from POSIX (again, I'm quoting POSIX 2008, but identical wording was in POSIX 2001): http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap05.html#tag_05 | ' ' | (An empty character position.) Represents one or more <blank> characters. ... | If both the field width and precision are omitted, the implementation may | precede, follow, or precede and follow numeric arguments of types d , i , and | u with <blank> characters And since both <tab> and <space> fall in the category of <blank>, and the %d specifies neither width nor precision, our existing output with leading spaces and a separating tab is 100% compliant. > > - It breaks other commands, for example: > > This should work: > > cat textfile | sort | uniq -c | cut -d " " -f 2- No, POSIX does not guarantee that it will work. > > Please reply not to me directly, but rather to the > > bug-coreutils <at> gnu.org mailing list. > > By the way, I replied using the button on the website > <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-textutils/2003-07/msg00013.html> (so, you may want to > change that address). The bug-textutils list is old, from the days before it was consolidated to bug- coreutils. But the old alias still forwards to the new list. -- Eric Blake _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
