Re: Extend cat to have headers like head/tail

[Andreas Schwab]

Bob Proulx bob-5cAygf9QrE/qt0dzr+a...@public.gmane.org writes:

 Erik Auerswald wrote:
 Eric Lavarde wrote:
  to check multiple files I often tend to use 'cat *somefiles*' but it's  
  all concatenated and difficult to read, so I switch back to 'head  
  -nSOMETHINGBIG *somefiles*' but it's not optimal and I might miss lines  
  if a file is bigger than expected.
 
 Try head -n-0.

 I like it! 

This is non-standard.  tail -n+1 is portable.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, sch...@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
And now for something completely different.

Re: Extend cat to have headers like head/tail

[Bob Proulx]

Andreas Schwab wrote:
 Bob Proulx writes:
  Erik Auerswald wrote:
  Try head -n-0.
 
  I like it! 
 
 This is non-standard.  tail -n+1 is portable.

Yes.  That is better.  (I did know about tail -n+1 but had forgotten
about it.  Thanks for the reminder.)

Bob

Re: Extend cat to have headers like head/tail

[Bob Proulx]

Erik Auerswald wrote:
 Eric Lavarde wrote:
  to check multiple files I often tend to use 'cat *somefiles*' but it's  
  all concatenated and difficult to read, so I switch back to 'head  
  -nSOMETHINGBIG *somefiles*' but it's not optimal and I might miss lines  
  if a file is bigger than expected.
 
 Try head -n-0.

I like it!  I did not know about that possibility before.  Thank you
for sharing it.  I would have suggested it if I had known about it.

Bob

Re: Extend cat to have headers like head/tail

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi Eric,

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 09:18:27AM +0200, Eric Lavarde wrote:
 to check multiple files I often tend to use 'cat *somefiles*' but it's  
 all concatenated and difficult to read, so I switch back to 'head  
 -nSOMETHINGBIG *somefiles*' but it's not optimal and I might miss lines  
 if a file is bigger than expected.

Try head -n-0.

HTH,
Erik

Extend cat to have headers like head/tail

[Eric Lavarde]

Hi,

to check multiple files I often tend to use 'cat *somefiles*' but it's 
all concatenated and difficult to read, so I switch back to 'head 
-nSOMETHINGBIG *somefiles*' but it's not optimal and I might miss lines 
if a file is bigger than expected.


Would it be possible to add an option '--header' to cat so that it 
separates multiple files with headers containing filenames, exactly like 
head and tail do? It wouldn't be the behavior by default obviously so 
that it wouldn't break anything.


Thanks, Eric