bug#9019: wc -l bug

[Eric Blake]

tag 9019 notabug
thanks

On 07/07/2011 02:31 AM, Andrey Sheyko wrote:
> Hello!
> I've found out that wc -l doen't count the last line if there is no CR in the 
> end of line

Thanks for the report.  However, this is not a bug, but a requirement of
POSIX.  Furthermore, I think you meant NL, not CR.

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/wc.html

"-l
    Write to the standard output the number of <newline> characters in
each input file.
...
Early proposals only specified the results when input files were text
files. The current specification more closely matches historical
practice. (Bytes, words, and <newline> characters are counted separately
and the results are written when an end-of-file is detected.)"

A file that does not end in a newline is _not_ a text file, and the
partial data is _not_ counted as a line according to historical practice.

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-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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