Subject: bug#13227: seq -s broken in coretutils 8.20?

From: Philipp Gortan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:53:07 +0100

Dear coreutils crowd,

I recently upgraded the coreutils on my Gentoo AMD64 from 8.16 to 8.20.
I used the seq command to generate the values of an SQL "in" statement.
Since I upgraded, the SQL is no longer correct - here is what I found out:

$ seq -s, 6 9; seq --version

6
7,8,9,seq (GNU coreutils) 8.20
...

(nb: newline after the "6", the comma after the 9 and the missing newline)

After downgrading to 8.16, I get:

$ seq -s, 6 9; seq --version
6,7,8,9
seq (GNU coreutils) 8.16
...

For reference, on a RHEL 5.6, the output is also:

$ seq -s, 6 9; seq --version
6,7,8,9
seq (GNU coreutils) 5.97

So to me, it looks as if the speed optimizations in 8.20 broke the "-s"
feature of seq.

I have recompiled coreutils with the vanilla useflag, which means that
no gentoo-specific patches are applied. The attachted text file contains
further information (compiler version and flags, etc.).

Can anyone reproduce this behavior?

Philipp