bug#14505: Bug in "cat" command

[Kakkar, Mayank (NSN - IN/Bangalore)]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for your prompt reply. 

I am referring to the manual -> 'Sams teach yourself shell in 24 hours', which 
is authored by Sriranga Veeraraghavan. 

Following is example potrayed in that manual:

If multiple files are specified, the contents of the files are concatenated in 
the output, but line numbering is restarted at 1 for each file. As an 
illustration, the following command,

$ cat -b fruits users

produces the output

1 Fruit Price/lbs Quantity
2 Banana $0.89 100
3 Peach $0.79 65
4 Kiwi $1.50 22
5 Pineapple $1.29 35
6 Apple $0.99 78

1 ranga
2 vathsa
3 amma

So, this was what led me think this is a bug in cat command for RHEL 5.7, 
because this guy must have experimented it on the RHEL machine before printing 
it in the manual. 

Regards
Mayank
-----Original Message-----
From: ext Eric Blake [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 8:57 PM
To: Kakkar, Mayank (NSN - IN/Bangalore)
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: bug#14505: Bug in "cat" command

tag 14505 needinfo
thanks

On 05/29/2013 05:57 AM, Kakkar, Mayank (NSN - IN/Bangalore) wrote:
> Hi RHEL Team,

This is the upstream coreutils list; if you were trying to reach RHEL
support, you should contact Red Hat per your contract with them.

> 
> I was working with cat command and testing its functionality. I learnt in one 
> of the manuals that if multiple files are specified, the contents of the 
> files are concatenated in the output, but line numbering is restarted at 1 
> for each file.

Thanks for the report.  What manual was this?  I don't see anything
implying that in the 'info cat' section of the official coreutils
manual, so this is likely a bug in downstream documentation rather than
an actual problem in coreutils.  But without knowing a URL of the faulty
documentation, we can't tell you where to redirect your report.

> Here, we can see that the numbering does not restarts with the new file 
> contents.

coreutils' cat has never restarted numbering with new files. Maybe you
were thinking of 'sed --separate'?  At any rate, we're probably going to
close this report as not a bug, although I've left it open for a bit
longer in case you can tell us more details about what led you to
believe that renumbering from 1 was expected, in case there is something
we need to improve in coreutils' documentation.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org