Hi Doug, At 2025-03-27T15:50:50-0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote: > It seems my reply to Clem went astray. POSIX Part 2, Shell and > Utilities, is very clear: > > 2..2.2.181 text file: A File that contains characters organized into > one or more lines. > The lines shall not contain NUL characters ... > > 2.2.2.95 line: A sequence of zero or more non-<newline> characters > plus a terminating <newline> character, > > Oddly--and in my opinion wrongly--the standard excludes empty files. > It would be a shock if an editor or groff refused to process an empty > file and thereby broke Kernighan's law, "Do nothing gracefully".
I think I can claim that GNU troff has long upheld that principle. $ printf '' | ~/groff-HEAD/bin/groff | grep . || echo NO OUTPUT NO OUTPUT $ printf '' | ~/groff-1.23.0/bin/groff | grep . || echo NO OUTPUT NO OUTPUT $ printf '' | ~/groff-1.22.4/bin/groff | grep . || echo NO OUTPUT NO OUTPUT $ printf '' | ~/groff-1.22.3/bin/groff | grep . || echo NO OUTPUT NO OUTPUT That carries us back through over 10 years of groff development. I'd bet it's been the case since 1991. Maybe earlier. Regards, Branden
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