Re: Proposed new feature: head --show-truncation

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 09:23:08PM +0100, Ed Avis wrote:
> A reasonable argument against --show-truncation would be to
> demonstrate that it can be done with a trivial shell script wrapping
> head itself.

What about

n=2
cat ~/todo | (head /dev/null; sed $n'!b;n;s/.*/[[trunc]]/;q')

or

n=2
cat ~/todo |
        while read l
        do
                n=`expr $n - 1`
                if [ $n -lt 0 ]
                then
                        echo '[[trunc]]'
                        break
                fi
                echo $l | head
        done

;-)

I mean that trivial shell script which doesn't use "head" should also
count.

Stepan