Bug in wc.

[walter harms]

Michael Abbott schrieb:
> On Sun, 7 Mar 2010, Rob Landley wrote:
>> [...]
>> The underlying behavioral wonkiness in busybox "cut" is:
>>
>> $ busybox wc -c vmlinux
>>   3335777 vmlinux
>> $ wc -c vmlinux
>> 3335777 vmlinux
>>
>> Note that we have leading whitespace, the gnu version doesn't. [...]
>>
>> Why do we have unnecessary leading whitespace?  What happend to small 
>> and simple and doing no more than absolutely necessary?
> 
> Presumably the code contains a format string of the form "% 9d" 
> written like that so the output looks pretty on multiple files.
> 
> In fact, that's got to be the case.  Look at the frankly horrible thing 
> that gnu wc does on multiple files:
> 
> $ wc -c wc.c yes.c
> 4974 wc.c
>  823 yes.c
> 5797 total
> $
> 
> There must be code in gnu wc to remember the maximum count length and 
> format accordingly, so what busybox does is indeed simpler ... but not 
> quite clever enough it would seem
> 
> I'm sure the 9-space formatting would suffice for multiple outputs, but 
> clearly for a single file it has to be avoided.  Afraid I'm too witless 
> today to work up a patch, but it should be easy enough.


perhaps it is more easy adding a 'tr -s " "' to the linux kernel build script ?
that would leave only one space to worry about no matter how much there where
originaly.

re,
 wh