[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: limited --width argument for fmt
From: |
Philip Rowlands |
Subject: |
Re: limited --width argument for fmt |
Date: |
Wed, 12 Jul 2006 02:55:45 +0100 (BST) |
On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
This a bug report against fmt.
address@hidden test]$ fmt -w 12345
fmt: invalid width: `12345'
What I'm trying to achieve here is to unwrap lines, aka "tr '\n' ' '"
but using fmt. According to GNU Coding Standards, GNU tools should not
have hard limits on the size of input or parameters when it doesn't make
sense...
You're quite right, fmt doesn't meet the "no arbitrary limits" goal in
this respect. This comment is found in the current code:
/* Size of paragraph buffer, in words and characters. Longer paragraphs
are handled neatly (cf. flush_paragraph()), so long as these values
are considerably greater than required by the width. These values
cannot be extended indefinitely: doing so would run into size limits
and/or cause more overflows in cost calculations. FIXME: Remove these
arbitrary limits. */
#define MAXWORDS 1000
#define MAXCHARS 5000
The longest line that fmt will handle is half of MAXCHARS. As you've
demonstrated, there are other ways to achieve the same effect with long
lines, so it's difficult to say if or when someone will prioritise
fixing the limitation.
Cheers,
Phil