Re: uniq -c outputs SPACES NUMBER TAB LINE

[Leif LeBaron]

> Why do you think it's a bug?

I imagine the insertion of leading spaces was deliberate, but I refer to it as 
bug because it has already been registered as such in your bug tracker, and 
also for the following reasons.

- It appears to be undocumented (I checked both, man and info pages).

- It appears to violate susv3 
(<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/uniq.html>) which 
clearly states:

        If the -c option is specified, the output file shall be empty or each 
line shall be of the form:
        "%d %s", <number of duplicates>, <line>

- It breaks other commands, for example:

        This should work:
        
                cat textfile | sort | uniq -c | cut -d " " -f 2-
        
        But instead the leading spaces must first be removed:
        
                cat textfile | sort | uniq -c | sed 's/^[ \t]*//' | cut -d " " 
-f 2-


> Please reply not to me directly, but rather to the
> address@hidden mailing list.

By the way, I replied using the button on the website 
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-textutils/2003-07/msg00013.html> (so, 
you may want to change that address).

Please confirm that this message has been received.

Thanks,
Leif