Paul Eggert wrote: > Paul Jarc writes: > > "Bryce Nesbitt (mailing list account)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > The "wc" command always seems to place leading spaces on all results, > > It doesn't for me, with 5.2.1. Upgrade? > > Yes, the behavior changed in 5.1.0. > ... > coreutils 5.1.0 or later you can rely on "wc -l" to omit leading > spaces when it is given zero operands or one operand.
And there was much rejoicing. However... > POSIX allows leading spaces, though, so you can't rely on this > behavior in portable code. Unfortunately there will be a lot of pre-5.2.0 wc commands out there for a long time. Also SysV-like systems such as HP-UX never emited spaces. But IBM AIX does emit spaces. Oh the humanity of it all! So regardless of coreutils behavior portable scripts should code for wc emitting spaces. Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
