Re: GNU Parallel Bug Reports --header and --colsep parsing is aberrant when used without arguments

[Coby Viner]

Hi Ole,

Thanks so much for clarifying this–I see now that I had misread the --header section of the man page. My sincere apologies for another invalid bug report.

Really appreciate all your great work on GNU Parallel!

-- Coby

On Fri, June 30, 2017 11:43 pm, Ole Tange wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 1:26 AM, Coby Viner <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> --header and --colsep parsing is aberrant when used without arguments.
>
> First: Thanks for an error report that is very easy to understand. I
> wish all error reports where as well written as this.
>
>> Error example:
>>
>> Failing case 1:
>>
>> address@hidden:~] parallel --dry-run -j 1 --header --colsep '\t' "echo
>> f1={f-1} f2={f2}" :::: <(perl -e 'printf "f-1\tf2\nA\tB\nC\tD\n"')
>> \t echo f1=A f2=B
>> \t echo f1=C f2=D
>
> Here you are giving --header the argument of '--colsep'. So the equivalent
> is:
>
> parallel --header '--colsep' --dry-run -j 1 '\t' "echo f1={f-1}
> f2={f2}" :::: <(perl -e 'printf "f-1\tf2\nA\tB\nC\tD\n"')
>
> --header always takes an argument and you are giving it one (albeit a
> weird one).
>
>> Failing case 2:
>>
>> address@hidden:~] parallel --dry-run -j 1 --header '.*\n' --colsep "echo
>> f1={f-1} f2={f2}" :::: <(perl -e 'printf "f-1\tf2\nA\tB\nC\tD\n"')
>
> Here you give --colsep the argument "echo f1={f-1} f2={f2}". This is
> also a pretty weird argument to give --colsep.
>
> In both cases I do not see a way to detect this: You _should_ be able
> to give pretty weird input to both --colsep and --header if your data
> requires this.
>
>> Description:
>>
>> It appears that --header and --colsep when used with their default
>> arguments
>> can produce inconsistent results, if an argument is provided to only one
>> of
>> the two parameters. The result is counter-intuitive.
>
> There is no default argument - they _always_ take an argument.
>
> /Ole
>