Re: bug report - uniq

[James Youngman]

On Dec 18, 2007 6:40 AM, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
> Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > As an aside, I'm wondering if the --help output for uniq should be a bit
> > more explicit about this property; contrast it with the output for join,
>
> Unlike 'join', the input to 'uniq' need not be sorted, so it's not
> immediately clear how to reword its --help output.

Probably too long:

$ diff -ub uniq.help.orig  uniq.help.new
--- uniq.help.orig      2007-12-18 10:22:47.000000000 +0000
+++ uniq.help.new       2007-12-18 10:24:22.000000000 +0000
@@ -2,6 +2,10 @@
 Discard all but one of successive identical lines from INPUT (or
 standard input), writing to OUTPUT (or standard output).

+If INPUT is not already sorted, or it was sorted using only part of
+each line as the key, then more than one copy of a line may appear in
+OUTPUT (because they did not appear consecutively in INPUT).
+
 Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
   -c, --count           prefix lines by the number of occurrences
   -d, --repeated        only print duplicate lines