Hi Jim, > This behavior is not specified, and is currently untested. > (it's a GNU invention, from Bruno Haible in textutils-1.22d, > which was back in 1997)
The intention of this option is and was to measure the maximum number of screen columns used by a file. For many purposes, people are encouraged to create/send/commit files with at most 80 screen columns. Or at most 79 screen columns for others. Or at most 74 columns for GNU texinfo files. The option '-L' was intended as a fast check for this metric. The original mail, sent to bug-gnu-utils on 1997-10-31, had this explanation: "While GNU "wc" returns the vertical extent of a piece of text - i.e. the number of lines - it does not yet return the horizontal extent of a piece of text - i.e. the number of columns. This is a useful functionality, if you want to know - whether a text will fit on the paper when sent to the printer, - whether an email exceeds the recommended 72 character limit, - (in combination with "nm") how long the identifiers were that made `ranlib' dump core, - etc." I propose a clarification in the documentation (see below). > I'm tempted to make the change, but it seems too drastic, after 11 years. > Do any of you rely on the current TAB-counting behavior of GNU wc? > > Bruno, what do you think? If you change the option to count every tab as 1, or every character as 1 regardless of its screen width, the option -L is not usable for its main purpose any more. Bruno 2008-08-22 Bruno Haible <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * doc/coreutils.texi (wc invocation): Explain what the option -L measures. --- coreutils.texi.bak 2008-08-22 23:55:47.000000000 +0200 +++ coreutils.texi 2008-08-22 23:59:03.000000000 +0200 @@ -3137,7 +3137,9 @@ With the @option{--max-line-length} option, @command{wc} prints the length of the longest line per file, and if there is more than one file it -prints the maximum (not the sum) of those lengths. +prints the maximum (not the sum) of those lengths. The line lengths here +are measured in screen columns, according to the current locale and +assuming tab positions in every 8th column. The program accepts the following options. Also see @ref{Common options}. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils