Re: Leading spaces from wc --lines

[Bob Proulx]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> Paul Jarc writes:
> > "Bryce Nesbitt (mailing list account)" <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > The "wc" command always seems to place leading spaces on all results, 
> > It doesn't for me, with 5.2.1.  Upgrade?
> 
> Yes, the behavior changed in 5.1.0.
> ...
> coreutils 5.1.0 or later you can rely on "wc -l" to omit leading
> spaces when it is given zero operands or one operand.

And there was much rejoicing.  However...

> POSIX allows leading spaces, though, so you can't rely on this
> behavior in portable code.

Unfortunately there will be a lot of pre-5.2.0 wc commands out there
for a long time.  Also SysV-like systems such as HP-UX never emited
spaces.  But IBM AIX does emit spaces.  Oh the humanity of it all!  So
regardless of coreutils behavior portable scripts should code for wc
emitting spaces.

Bob