tags 23190 notabug
close 23190
thanks
Hello Seva,
On 04/01/2016 06:02 PM, Seva Adari wrote:
I am not sure if this a bug or expected behavior! Here is different output[...]
from each run variation of wc invocation:
wc -l test.txt Output: 20
awk '{print $0}' /tmp/test.txt | wc -l Output: 21
cut /tmp/test.txt -f1 | wc -l Output: 21
File, test.txt (attached here with) could be missing last "new line".
This is not a bug in 'wc', but the way it works (perhaps not intuitively):
'wc' does not count conceptual lines but the number of newline characters in the file.
Since the last file does not have a newline character (ASCII 0x10) - it is not counted.
The following will demonstrate:
$ printf "hello" | wc -l
0
$ printf "hello\n" | wc -l
1
$ printf "a\nb\nc" | wc -l
2
And 'awk' indeed automatically adds a newline when using 'print', like so:
$ printf "a\nb\nc" | awk '{print $0}' | wc -l
3
I'm therefore closing the bug, but discussion can continue by replying to this thread.
regards,
- assaf