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
