RE: Undocumented cut feature

[Gambs, David (CONT)]

Bob,

>From vi w/set list I have the following -

file3:
optvg^M$
4$
3171$

file2 (the one that I cut on):
 optvg$
 4 MB$
 3171 / 12.39 GB$

The command:
cut -f2 -d' ' ~/file2 > ~/file3

Your suggested command gives:
$ cut -f2 -d' ' file2 | od -tx1 -c
0000000 6f 70 74 76 67 0d 0a 34 0a 33 31 37 31 0a
          o   p   t   v   g  \r  \n   4  \n   3   1   7   1  \n
0000016

And I have found differences within RedHat on the vgdisplay. This
vgdisplay is in /sbin and not linked to anything. On the system where
the problem does not happen (newer coreutils & OS release) the command
is /usr/sbin/vgdisplay and is linked to lvm. Don't know where that would
make a difference though.

> When I just captured the output from vgdisplay and looked at it in vi,

> it was not there either. I had this as a straight pipe but did not get

> the vg name in the final output which had all three on a single line -

> the ^M would wipe out the vg name.

>>I don't understand.  Could you post the exact example?

cd ~
/sbin/vgdisplay | egrep -e Name -e "PE Size" -e Free | cut -b 22- | cut
-f2 -d' ' > file1
rm file.out
touch file.out
gawk '
{ line0 = /[:alpha:]/ }
{ printf "%s ", $line0 >> "file.out" }
{ getline }
{ line1 = /[:print:]/ }
{ printf "%i ", $1 >> "file.out" }
{ getline }
{ line2 = /[:print:]/ }
{ print $1 >> "file.out" } ' file1
rm file1

In the gawk script when you output line0, the ^M puts the cursor at the
beginning of the line. The next print lines then overwrite what was
there. In this case optvg is completely overwritten. A longer vg name
would have some of it left.

$ cat file.out
 4 3171

> And we are at core utilities: coreutils-4.5.3-28.4

And OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 6)
Linux version 2.4.21-47.ELsmp (address@hidden)
(gcc version 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-54)) #1 SMP Wed Jul 5
20:38:41 EDT 2006

> However, the issue was cleared in coreutils-5.2.1-31.6

And OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 5)
Linux version 2.6.9-55.0.6.ELsmp
(address@hidden) (gcc version 3.4.6 20060404
(Red Hat 3.4.6-8)) #1 SMP Thu Aug 23 11:11:20 EDT 2007

Good data points.  But if so then I believe it was probably related to
native language support added by the vendor.  In which case you would
need to work through your vendor to acquire a patch that would be
compatible with your system.

> I do like your method of getting the info into variables and that 
> would allow me to output things better, although I think your way will

> have an array on each variable when there is more than one vg on the 
> system (something the client has all over the place).

Ah, yes, multiple volume groups.  I had not accounted for that in my
example.  Good observation.

And all this started on HP-UX. The script works just fine there. It was
when I brought it over to Linux that problems arose and modifications
had to be made.


- dmg



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