tags 22816 + wontfix done Re https://debbugs.gnu.org/22816, I realized that printing any line number upon EOF would necessitate counting them from the start, and I would rather not do that.
If you encounter EOF in this case and want to know how many newlines were in one of those inputs, you can run "wc -l" on that input. Making cmp perform that task does not seem worthwhile, because one would have to choose between always counting newlines (like wc -l does), and thus incurring this added cost all the time, or accepting a partial (and racy) solution of rereading the regular file upon EOF. I say "partial" because if the input is not seekable, that is not even possible. And "racy" because once rewound and reread, we may then be processing different content. So I'm closing this as WONTFIX.