On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Jim Meyering wrote: > > Have you had the time to look at my wc reallines patch? > > Thanks for the patch. I'm not sure it's worthwhile, > but am willing to be convinced. Making your argument in > the form of examples (diffs to coreutils.texi) demonstrating > the usefulness of the new option would help.
The current wc doesn't really count the number of lines in a file. It counts LF characters. If we have this example file.. test1<LF>test2<LF>test3<LF> ..wc -l will say that it has 3 LF characters. However, if we have this example file.. test1<LF>test2<LF>test3 ..wc -l will say that it has 2 LF characters. This is correct, but not very useful to the user who wants to know how many lines that the file consists of. Several editors, including GNU Emacs and some editors on the Windows platform, are known to produce this kind of file without an <LF> at the end. My patch therefore adds the new -i (--reallines) option, which counts the actual number of lines in a file. wc -i on the second example file above would give the output 3. I think this would be a worthwhile addition to wc, and I have seen in the bug-textutils archives that a couple of others have asked about this, indicating that they too would be interested in this. If I have convinced you, I will produce a patch against the alpha version of coreutils. I'm unfortunately not familiar with TeX, but I can try to add some information in the manual as well. // Ulf Harnhammar _______________________________________________ Bug-textutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-textutils
