On 02/17/2011 03:19 PM, George Gallen wrote: > I'm not sure whether this is a bug or not. > > On Redhat Enterprise Linux, the cut command will accept the following " cut -c0-5 " (Cut ver 5.97) > On Fedora it will not accept the 0, it must be " cut -c1-5 " (cut ver 8.5) Thanks for the report. POSIX states this: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/cut.html "The application shall ensure that the option-argument list (see options -b, -c, and -f below) is a -separated list or -separated list of positive numbers and ranges. Ranges can be in three forms. The first is two positive numbers separated by a ( low- high), which represents all fields from the first number to the second number. The second is a positive number preceded by a (- high), which represents all fields from field number 1 to that number. The third is a positive number followed by a ( low-), which represents that number to the last field, inclusive." 0 is not a positive integer, it lends itself to confusion (is the first character 0-based or 1-based?), and coreutils had not documented it as an explicit extension, therefore this functionality was removed as a bug fix in 6.9.90: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=a6a447fc And NEWS backs this up: cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid; before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2). > I was able to copy the cut command from RHEL to Fedora 14 and it works fine. What am losing > between these two versions? Your script was not POSIX compliant to begin with - it was pure luck that it worked for you in older installations. -- Eric Blake eblake@redhat.com +1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org