Re: Bug in "comm" command

[Bob Proulx]

address@hidden wrote:
> I have isntalled the CYGwin suite ant the command 'comm' that is provided
> (man page is laelled 2.0.21) is misbehaving when file f1 contains a set of
> rows and file f2 contains a subset of it as far
> 
> As I unedrstand comm should work as follows: if

Thank your for reporting this problem.  Your understanding matches my
understanding.

> f1={
> x
> y
> z
> }
>
> f2={
> x
> }
>
> comm -12 f1 f2
> 
> should suppress col 1 and 2 and should produce a file with one line
> fout={x} and instead it produces and empty output.

Not for me.

  comm -12 f1 f2
  x

> comm -13 f1 f2
> 
> should suppress col 1 and 3 and should produce an empty file and instead
> it produces a file of one line fout={x}.

  comm -13 f1 f2
  [...no output...]

> comm -23 f1 f2
> should supprss col 2 and  3 and produce a file of two lines
> fout={
> y
> z
> }
> and instead it produces a file of three lines
> fout={
> x
> y
> z
> }

Again I can't recreate that problem.  Thank you for generating a nice
test case to illustrate the failure.  Small test cases like that are
very much appreciated.

> At least this is waht I understand and what I get on an HP UX system.

Your understanding is correct.  I don't know why you are not getting
the proper results.  It looks to me like the software you have is
broken.  Since you are using Cygwin you will need to take your
question to the Cygwin list.  That is where the experts who ported the
GNU tools to MS-Windows exist.

Again, thanks for reporting this problem with the program but
unfortunately we can't help you here and I can only redirect you to
the right place for reporting Cygwin problems.  Please read the
following reference for how to report problems in the Cygwin tools and
then report your problem there.

  http://cygwin.com
  http://cygwin.com/problems.html

STABLE
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.bz2
  (coreutils is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)

BETA
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.gz
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.bz2

Bob