Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

wc: unexpected counts for -w flag #457

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Feb 12, 2024
Merged

Conversation

mknos
Copy link
Contributor

@mknos mknos commented Feb 12, 2024

  • As noted earlier, word count output in wc did not match GNU version
  • A word is one or more non-space characters, surrounded by whitespace (including newline)
  • The old code seemed to count the spaces in between words, but I couldn't follow it
  • To test this I built the OpenBSD version of wc on my linux system, then compared total word count for a set of files between OpenBSD, GNU and perl
%$wc_obsd -w s*
wc: s: Is a directory
       0 s
     524 seq
     330 shar
     319 shar2
     225 sleep
    4098 sort
    1789 spell
     895 split
wc: sssss: Is a directory
       0 sssss
     444 strings
    1116 sum
    9740 total

%perl wc -w s*
wc: 's' is a directory
       524 seq
       330 shar
       319 shar2
       225 sleep
      4098 sort
      1789 spell
       895 split
wc: 'sssss' is a directory
       444 strings
      1116 sum
      9740 total

%/usr/bin/wc -w s*
/usr/bin/wc: s: Is a directory
      0 s
    524 seq
    330 shar
    319 shar2
    225 sleep
   4098 sort
   1789 spell
    895 split
/usr/bin/wc: sssss: Is a directory
      0 sssss
    444 strings
   1116 sum
   9740 total

* As noted earlier, word count output in wc did not match GNU version
* A word is one or more non-space characters, surrounded by whitespace (including newline)
* The old code seemed to count the spaces in between words, but I couldn't follow it
* To test this I built the OpenBSD version of wc on my linux system, then compared total word count for a set of files between OpenBSD, GNU and perl

%$wc_obsd -w s*
wc: s: Is a directory
       0 s
     524 seq
     330 shar
     319 shar2
     225 sleep
    4098 sort
    1789 spell
     895 split
wc: sssss: Is a directory
       0 sssss
     444 strings
    1116 sum
    9740 total
%perl wc -w s*
wc: 's' is a directory
       524 seq
       330 shar
       319 shar2
       225 sleep
      4098 sort
      1789 spell
       895 split
wc: 'sssss' is a directory
       444 strings
      1116 sum
      9740 total
%/usr/bin/wc -w s*
/usr/bin/wc: s: Is a directory
      0 s
    524 seq
    330 shar
    319 shar2
    225 sleep
   4098 sort
   1789 spell
    895 split
/usr/bin/wc: sssss: Is a directory
      0 sssss
    444 strings
   1116 sum
   9740 total
@github-actions github-actions bot added Type: enhancement improve a feature that already exists Priority: low get to this whenever Program: wc The wc command labels Feb 12, 2024
@briandfoy briandfoy merged commit 3f93db9 into briandfoy:master Feb 12, 2024
2 checks passed
@briandfoy briandfoy added Status: accepted The fix is accepted and removed Priority: low get to this whenever labels Feb 13, 2024
@briandfoy briandfoy self-assigned this Feb 14, 2024
@briandfoy
Copy link
Owner

changes: fix -w to report the right number

@briandfoy briandfoy added Status: released there is a new release with this fix and removed Status: accepted The fix is accepted labels Mar 3, 2024
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
Program: wc The wc command Status: released there is a new release with this fix Type: enhancement improve a feature that already exists
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants