bug#5832: bug#10365: [PATCH] uniq: add ability to skip last N chars or fields

[Pádraig Brady]

On 12/26/2011 05:39 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 12/26/11 08:35, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> supporting --key would not provide this functionality.
> 
> It would support it in the most common cases, no?
> That is, if every line has (say) 10 fields, then
> the proposed 'uniq -F3' would be equivalent to
> the proposed 'uniq -k1,7'.

That's what I thought at first too,
but then why didn't Adrien propose the
more normal --check-fields=7 rather than
the unusual -F3.

> I can't offhand think of good use cases for uniq -F
> that would not be subsumed by uniq -k.

Me too, Having a variable number of fields per line,
but ignoring the last constant N fields is very unusual,
and why I asked for a concrete example.

Personally I'm leaning towards suggesting `the rev| uniq -f | rev`
is fine for this edge case.

cheers,
Pádraig.