Re: wc: expand help of '-L' (and a question)

[Assaf Gordon]

Answering myself:

On 04/24/2015 10:38 PM, Assaf Gordon wrote:
> I seem to get unexpected result with '-L' when forcing C locale.
<...>
> # using C locale, characters=bytes=3,
> # but longest line is 0 ?
> $ printf "\xe2\x99\xa5" | LC_ALL=C wc -cmL
>        3       3       0
>
> This could be because of wc.c line 492, where "isprint" is called on each byte 
> (e.g. isprint('\xe2') is false),
> and so these characters are not counted at all?

Under C locale these characters are not printable, so not counted.

So technically, '-L' prints longest line using only printable characters under 
the locale, which is different then the 'characters/-m' definition.
meaning it's quite tricky to count longest line of bytes in a file.

perhaps my previous patch should be reworded...