bug#9023: pr command does not honor -f or --form-feed option

[Jim Meyering]

Jim Meyering wrote:
> Conklin,Paul W. wrote:
>> I think that I have found a bug with the pr command
>>
>> Version Info
>> pr 5.97                          October 2008                            
>> PR(1)
>
> Thank you for the report.
> I confirm that GNU pr (even the latest, from coreutils-8.12)
> is not compatible with the pr from Solaris 10:
>
>     solaris$ seq 9|/usr/bin/pr -t -f -l3|grep -c '^L'
>     3
>     solaris$ seq 9|pr -t -f -l3|grep -c '^L'
>     0
>
> The source of pr is the ugliest and least maintainable (by far) in coreutils,
> but we have decent test coverage for it, so we should be able to fix this 
> soon.

For the record, NetBSD 5.0.2's pr supports -F but not -f,
and its -F behavior matches that of GNU pr:

    netbsd$ seq 9|/usr/bin/pr -t -F -l3|cat -A
    1$
    2$
    3$
    4$
    5$
    6$
    7$
    8$
    9$

However, on FreeBSD 8.2, OpenBSD 4.7, darwin 10.8 and SunOS 5.11
the vendor pr behavior matches that of AIX and solaris-10.