Bug in wc.

Denys Vlasenko vda.linux at googlemail.com
Tue Mar 9 03:19:38 UTC 2010


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 ...
> -mike

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" :)
-- 
vda


More information about the busybox mailing list