I mean if you want to get picky about it and have this work exactly like grep -q, then you need to make the flag accept a threshold value, which it should match or exceed. So maybe: wc -l -q3
That doesn’t have the same intuitive feel to me, but it wouldn’t violate the notion of how exit codes should be used either. -Alex Boese Sent from my Triceratops. > On Oct 6, 2020, at 2:19 PM, Kaz Kylheku (Coreutils) > <962-396-1...@kylheku.com> wrote: > > On 2020-10-05 08:40, A B wrote: >> Many thanks for all the much needed contributions to society as a whole. >> I did have one feature to request for wc, which I think would be >> highly complementary to grep’s -q flag. It would be really cool if wc >> could have a -q flag as well, which could return matches within a >> predefined threshold as the exit code itself. So for example, if I >> wrote ‘wc -l -q’ at the end of a pipe, then no output would be >> returned, but the exit code would return a 3 if three lines were >> found. > > I don't see this exact feature in the documentation of GNU grep. > grep terminates with a 0 status (success) when matches are found, > and this is true with -q. > > The idea has limited applicability; there are only as few as 8 bits > (or fewer?) available in the process status word for encoding the > exit code. > > It could be useful for counting the number of lines or characters > in files that are somehow guaranteed to be small. > > The inversion of the exit success polarity is also troubling. > If nothing is counted, that's 0 (success), whereas if anything > is counted, that is a termination failure. >
