On Sun, 7 Mar 2010, Rob Landley wrote: > [...] > The underlying behavioral wonkiness in busybox "cut" is: > > $ busybox wc -c vmlinux > 3335777 vmlinux > $ wc -c vmlinux > 3335777 vmlinux > > Note that we have leading whitespace, the gnu version doesn't. [...] > > Why do we have unnecessary leading whitespace? What happend to small > and simple and doing no more than absolutely necessary?
Presumably the code contains a format string of the form "% 9d" written like that so the output looks pretty on multiple files. In fact, that's got to be the case. Look at the frankly horrible thing that gnu wc does on multiple files: $ wc -c wc.c yes.c 4974 wc.c 823 yes.c 5797 total $ There must be code in gnu wc to remember the maximum count length and format accordingly, so what busybox does is indeed simpler ... but not quite clever enough it would seem I'm sure the 9-space formatting would suffice for multiple outputs, but clearly for a single file it has to be avoided. Afraid I'm too witless today to work up a patch, but it should be easy enough. _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list busybox@busybox.net http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
