Re: [RFC] linecut addition

[Matthew Woehlke]

Steven Schubiger wrote:
> Matthew Woehlke <mw_triad.NO.SPAM.PLEASE> wrote:
>
> > Do you plan to have a means of specifying a number of lines? E.g.:
> >
> > $ seq 10 | linecut --range 5,+3
> > 5
> > 6
> > 7
>
> I like the idea. And it should be rather easy to calculate the
> ending line position.

Well, yes, I would hope so. If you can't write 'a + b' in your program, 
something is wrong ;-). (Use case is of course e.g. scripts where the 
beginning line is not known in advance, but you know you want N lines 
total.)

> I hope the distinction between the '-' & '+'
> "prefixes" would be clear enough.

'-N' is already a fairly common convention, so I don't expect problems. 
And I stole '+N' from sed, of course :-).

> > Btw, how do you match 5 through end? '5,-0'? 
>
> Yes.

Ok. (An alternative, if sed-like format wins, would of course be '5,$', 
but '5,-0' is fine.)

> > What does a reversed range (e.g. '5,2') match?
>
> That shouldn't be allowed. Or should it?

I was asking you :-). Personally I think printing lines backwards is 
probably not so good an idea, so I would either match only the first 
line, or else print a warning to stderr. Anyway '5,2' was just an 
"obvious" example; I would expect this to be more likely with a range 
like '5,-5' on input with fewer than nine lines.

--
Matthew
morphir: so much confusion :S kmake, kdemake, qmake make cmake etc.
logixoul: you forgot cmakekde :)
morphir: and bakemeacake