On 2026-04-17 06:23, Laurent Lyaudet wrote:
My patch works, it adds a needed feature
It's not clear that the feature is all that needed for shell scripts,
given that one can write something like this:
for file in *; do
lines=$(wc -l <"$file") &&
printf '"%s" contains %d lines\n' "$file" $lines
done
where you can substitute whatever command you like for the printf command.
If the feature were needed we could indeed add it, but given the
relative lack of need it could well be better to leave wc alone. There
is a nonzero cost to support unnecessary features.
I write this email in the hope that others can see this approach to the
original problem.
