On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 12:24:53AM -0500, Jason Huggins wrote:
> Hi, Noah... out of curiosity (and to further help the cause), is there an
> online reference for that rule? Perhaps I've read too many "citation needed"
> comments in Wikipedia to let this one go. :-) I did some searching, but
> couldn't find a definitive, explicit mention.)
3.392 Text File
A file that contains characters organized into one or more lines. The lines do
not contain NUL characters and none can exceed {LINE_MAX} bytes in length,
including the <newline>.
- http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/basedefs/xbd_chap03.html
3.205 Line
A sequence of zero or more non- <newline>s plus a terminating <newline>.
- http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/basedefs/xbd_chap03.html
Canonical Mode Input Processing
In canonical mode input processing, terminal input is processed in units of
lines. A line is delimited by a newline character (NL), an end-of-file
character
(EOF), or an end-of-line (EOL) character. See Special Characters for more
information on EOF and EOL. This means that a read request will not return
until
an entire line has been typed or a signal has been received. Also, no matter
how
many bytes are requested in the read() call, at most one line will be
returned. It is not, however, necessary to read a whole line at once; any
number
of bytes, even one, may be requested in a read() without losing information.
- http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/xbd/termios.html
Many applications choke when processing text files if last line is not properly
terminated, as your experience with the shell demonstrates.
> Also, is your patch for this available online, too? I suspect it hasn't made
> the switch into Jira (I couldn't find it there.) If not, this might be the
> motivation I need to start reading some Erlang code and try to figure out what
> to edit on my own. :-)
Nope, sorry, it's been lost to the sands of time.
The patch should be quite simple thought, even for a non-Erlang programmer.
--
Noah Slater, http://people.apache.org/~nslater/
