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bug#16329: `head --lines=-0' prints nothing if no newline at the EOF
From: |
Eric Blake |
Subject: |
bug#16329: `head --lines=-0' prints nothing if no newline at the EOF |
Date: |
Fri, 03 Jan 2014 10:10:09 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.2.0 |
On 01/03/2014 10:02 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>> It depends on whether the file has a trailing newline.
>>
>> Per POSIX, 'head' is only required to operate on "text files"
>> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/head.html
>> and a "text file" must either be empty or have a trailing newline:
>> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap03.html#tag_03_397
>>
>> So this is not necessarily a bug. That said, since POSIX doesn't
>> specify what we should do, we are free to make it behave differently.
>
> BTW I still don't think POSIX is specifying that text files without
> a trailing newline are not text files.
>
> It states that text files can have zero or more lines,
Where "lines" is also a well-defined POSIX term:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap03.html#tag_03_206
> implying that the trailing new line is optional.
Wrong. The trailing newline character is mandatory in text files.
--
Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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