Hi,
I love your products.
I am using the 'uniq' command line utility on Cygwin, where I do most of my development work.
$ uniq --version
uniq (GNU coreutils) 8.24
Packaged by Cygwin (8.24-3)
Copyright (C) 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Written by Richard M. Stallman and David MacKenzie.
$
I feel confused about the usage options, particularly those for restricting comparison to a limited number of initial or non-initial characters or fields.
Observe:
$ uniq --h|egrep 'char|field'
-f, --skip-fields=N avoid comparing the first N fields
-s, --skip-chars=N avoid comparing the first N characters
-w, --check-chars=N compare no more than N characters in lines
...
...
...
So it looks like that for chars, 'uniq' has options to compare only the first N chars, or *all but* the first N chars.
Whereas for fields, 'uniq' has only the option to skip the first N fields, but has no corresponding option to compare *only* the first N fields.
Why this lack of symmetry? And what do I do when I need that missing functionality, to compare only an initial subset of fields in each line?
Ot, am I missing something?
Thanks!
Todd Shandelman
Houston, Texas