On Monday 08 March 2010 22:19:38 Denys Vlasenko wrote: > On Tuesday 09 March 2010 03:50, Mike Frysinger wrote: > > On Monday 08 March 2010 20:56:07 Denys Vlasenko wrote: > > > On Tuesday 09 March 2010 01:55, Harald Becker wrote: > > > > Hallo Rob! > > > > > > > > > Why do we have unnecessary leading whitespace? What happend to > > > > > small and simple and doing no more than absolutely necessary? > > > > > > > > As far as I remember the original (K&R) behavior of wc was always to > > > > produce leading whitespace (fixed format output). Only the newer > > > > versions of gnu wc striped of this leading whitespace. That lead to > > > > several shell script failures that had to be fixed during the last > > > > years. > > > > > > ... and now we have script failures because _new_ scripts expect _new_ > > > output format >>:( "Progress" sometimes looks like pointless churn. > > > > it depends on the options i think. normal `wc` still outputs leading > > spaces, but `wc -c` never does. coreutils-5.94 and coreutils-8.4 behave > > the same ... > > I distinctly remember old times when even 'wc -c <file' was spewing out > leading spaces. Gosh... I am old enough now to talk about "old times" :)
sorry, didnt mean to imply "never does" as "never has". 5.94 is the latest version i had sitting around already compiled ... i certainly believe you when you say older versions had leading whitespace. i recall `wc -l <file>` changing behavior at some point to not including leading whitespace if there's only one file as i had to often script around it in previous versions. -mike
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