[re-adding the bug, with permission] On 12/01/2014 01:10 PM, John Kendall wrote: > Thanks, Eric. > > My only, admittedly weak, rebuttal is that the behavior of sort might not > be the best behavior to imitate. It's understandable why POSIX defines > how sort behaves, since it's intended for multi-line input. > > It seems sed, which is frequently used for single lines of input, might be > a better analogy. Gnu sed 4.2.2 and solaris sed act the same way as > solaris cut (no newline added): > > $ printf "ooooooooooo" | sed 's/o/p/g' > ppppppppppp$
As a counter-argument, I recall hearing of other implementations of sed that silently omit a trailing line that lacks a newline. And perhaps GNU sed should be changed to always emit a trailing newline, but that's something to bring up on the sed mailing list :) > > > If my weak rebuttal is unconvincing, then I wonder if a note could be > added to the cut man page so that the next porter can find an answer > a little easier. As an interesting counterpoint, the Solaris version of > sort announces loudly when it does what POSIX requires: > > $ printf "ooooooooooo" | sort > sort: missing NEWLINE added at end of input file STDIN > ooooooooooo > $ Ouch - that's a bug in Solaris. POSIX does not allow for noise on stderr when giving a default 0 success exit status. > > > > Thanks for taking the time to clarify this. I've been using SunOS and > Solaris exclusively since 1992, so I've had a stable environment and > was oblivious to the unspecified behavior that my scripts depended on. > > Cheers, > John > I'll leave it to other contributors to weigh in on whether omitting the final newline on output when it was missing on input is worth the complexity of a change. -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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