re: nl (GNU coreutils) 6.9 Fedora 7 Linux Good morning--
I have not used nl for a long time but just found a use for it. It does the numbering that I want but it does more than that. The file I am numbering is many lines of text with interspersed blank lines. (It is data exported from an accounting system that is input to a perl program.) The blank lines would be more accurately be called empty or null lines as they do not contain any white space characters, simply consecutive new line characters in the data file. The perl program recognizes these empty lines and handles them as required by its specifications. After numbering the lines using: nl -s, -w1 -nln oldfile > newfile the perl program now chokes on the once empty lines in newfile. Upon examination I find that the empty lines are no longer empty. They now contain a number of space characters equal to the setting of the -w option. They cannot be suppressed entirely by specifying -w0 as that is reported as an invalid value, which is reasonable considering the purpose of -w. The man page (and info page) states that the t style is to "number only nonempty lines". This it does but it also changes the nonempty lines into lines containing spaces. I feel that this latter behavior should not be included in nl. Since nl has been around for many years there may be some users taking advantage of this undocumented behavior. Therefore I propose that an option be added to allow the user to suppress this historical behavior. In other words the option would direct nl to leave empty lines empty. I suggest the option be "-e". An alternative would be to specify this with a new body numbering style instead of an option. Thank you for your consideration of this matter. paul ps--Mac OS X version of nl has the same behavior and worse. If the -s option is present it inserts the separator character into the empty line following the string of spaces. I have no other Unix platforms available on which to try nl. -- Paul Almquist Eau Claire, WI USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
