Re: Suppress filenames in wc output

[Thomas Bohm]

Thank you for your answer. Now that I see your solution I have a D'oh! moment. There is only one problem. You won't see that stdin and files are treated differently by running wc --help or in the man page, just through info coreutils which I don't know how many people think about checking.

Cheers,

Tom

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 9:30 PM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:

On 02/11/2014 01:26 PM, Thomas Bohm wrote:
> Hey,
>
> By playing with a word list today I noticed I can't compute the number of
> average letters / word by simply doing a calc `wc -m file`/`wc -l file`
> because the filename is part of the output if wc is run on a file (on stdin
> it is suppressed). This is why I added a new flag -q so that a user can
> suppress that part of the output I will.  I don't have high hopes of it
> getting accepted, but I said I try :)

Thanks for the suggestion, but this already does what you want:

calc `wc -m < file`/`wc -l < file`

That is, POSIX requires that when reading from stdin rather than from a
filename, then there will be no filename in the output of wc.  As this
is already a standard way to suppress the output, I see no need to add a -q.

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Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
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