wc enhancement possibility

[Allan Chandler]

Good arbitrary-time-of-day, people.

I helped a colleague out today with a "wc" problem they were having with line 
counts when the final line of a file did not have a newline at the end of it.

Now this is technically not a bug since the doco explicitly states that "wc 
--lines/-l" gives the count of newline characters, not the count of lines. And, 
in any case, it could be argued that the definition of a line SHOULD be "zero 
or more characters followed by a newline".

However, this has caused confusion before in that a non-terminated final line 
COULD be considered a line, especially if you're just outputting the file.

I don't propose changing the behaviour of "--lines" since that would result in 
chaos for a large number of scripts in the world currently using it, and I 
don't wish to spend the rest of my life fighting off affected parties, 
Omega-Man-against-the-zombies style, because of the trouble I caused :-)

However, I wonder whether it would be worthwhile adding another option which 
included a final non-terminated line, something like "--lines-all".

I've seen some "wc" suggestions turned down in the past 
(https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.html) but these seem 
to generally be requests for things that other tools are better to provide.

Keeping in mind the philosophy of UNIX's "a tool should do one thing and do it 
well", and the fact that the purpose of "wC" is most definitely counting 
things, it appears it may be a better fit in the "wc" program itself rather 
than doing it as part of a pipeline.

Anyway, I'm really just raising it as a discussion point. Tell me what you 
think...

Al.


Allan Chandler | Software Engineer

DTI Group Ltd | Transit Security & Surveillance

31 Affleck Road, Perth Airport, WA 6105, AU

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