Thank you for your answer. Now that I see your solution I have a D'oh! moment. There is only one problem. You won't see that stdin and files are treated differently by running wc --help or in the man page, just through info coreutils which I don't know how many people think about checking.
Cheers, Tom On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 9:30 PM, Eric Blake <[email protected]> wrote: > On 02/11/2014 01:26 PM, Thomas Bohm wrote: > > Hey, > > > > By playing with a word list today I noticed I can't compute the number of > > average letters / word by simply doing a calc `wc -m file`/`wc -l file` > > because the filename is part of the output if wc is run on a file (on > stdin > > it is suppressed). This is why I added a new flag -q so that a user can > > suppress that part of the output I will. I don't have high hopes of it > > getting accepted, but I said I try :) > > Thanks for the suggestion, but this already does what you want: > > calc `wc -m < file`/`wc -l < file` > > That is, POSIX requires that when reading from stdin rather than from a > filename, then there will be no filename in the output of wc. As this > is already a standard way to suppress the output, I see no need to add a > -q. > > -- > Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 > Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org > >
