bug#33281: head does not consume input after '-c' is satisfied

[Assaf Gordon]

tags 33281 wontfix
severity 33281 wishlist
close 33281
stop

Hello,

On 2018-11-06 12:52 p.m., Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 11/5/18 1:17 PM, Philip Rowlands wrote:
> > To achieve consistency in the other direction, head could ignore the 
> > optimization to reduce the number of bytes read, and always read 8192 
> > bytes, knowing that some would be discarded.
>
> Let's not do that. It's less efficient and less useful than what GNU 
> 'head -c4' is doing now.
>
> > For widely differing values, the only way to produce the same residual 
> > output would be to consume all input data.
>
> Eeuuww. Let's *especially* not do that.

Given the above, I'm closing this as "wontfix".
Discussion can continue by replying to this thread.

-assaf