Subject: bug#14505: Bug in "cat" command

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 09:26:40 -0600

tag 14505 needinfo
thanks

On 05/29/2013 05:57 AM, Kakkar, Mayank (NSN - IN/Bangalore) wrote:
> Hi RHEL Team,

This is the upstream coreutils list; if you were trying to reach RHEL
support, you should contact Red Hat per your contract with them.

> 
> I was working with cat command and testing its functionality. I learnt in one of the manuals that if multiple files are specified, the contents of the files are concatenated in the output, but line numbering is restarted at 1 for each file.

Thanks for the report.  What manual was this?  I don't see anything
implying that in the 'info cat' section of the official coreutils
manual, so this is likely a bug in downstream documentation rather than
an actual problem in coreutils.  But without knowing a URL of the faulty
documentation, we can't tell you where to redirect your report.

> Here, we can see that the numbering does not restarts with the new file contents.

coreutils' cat has never restarted numbering with new files. Maybe you
were thinking of 'sed --separate'?  At any rate, we're probably going to
close this report as not a bug, although I've left it open for a bit
longer in case you can tell us more details about what led you to
believe that renumbering from 1 was expected, in case there is something
we need to improve in coreutils' documentation.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org