> A) behind the scenes, if these programs arent already almost the same > source, they should be
It would seem that if you can't tell from the behavior of the program than as a user of the program it does not matter. > B) MORE IMPORTANTLY: i think its very useful to have the following > features in either head or tail: > > instead of just tail -n10, which takes the last 10 lines, there should > be a way of doing all lines from line 10 to the end. There is. This is documented in both the --help output and the info documentation. tail -n +10 If the first character of N (the number of bytes or lines) is a `+', print beginning with the Nth item from the start of each file, otherwise, print the last N items in the file. N may have a multiplier suffix: b for 512, k for 1024, m for 1048576 (1 Meg). A first OPTION of -VALUE or +VALUE is treated like -n VALUE or -n +VALUE unless VALUE has one of the [bkm] suffix multipliers, in which case it is treated like -c VALUE or -c +VALUE. > C) i think this really calls for a new application to be created from > these 2. Some of its features wrt to cropping the file: If N=3 and M=7 then the following are examples. And some alternatives as well to show that there are many different ways of doing this. > first N lines head -n 3 file sed 3q file > last N lines tail -n 3 file > last lines from line N tail -n +3 file sed -n '3,$p' file > lines from line N to line M sed -n '3,7p' file perl -ne 'print if 3 ... 7' file awk '3 <= NR && NR <= 7' file > and then give it the best other features from head and tail. > > EXAMPLE: since its all in 1 file, and now all the features support > "follow" you can: > > take lines 20-30 from a file and then -follow it into another file > take all lines after line 5 and then -follow it into that file > > very very useful.... I am sorry but I don't follow this myself. Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-textutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-textutils
