Subject: Re: bug#15206: Report od bugs

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 05:51:14 -0600

tag 15206 notabug
thanks

On 08/29/2013 12:01 AM, Kaitao Lai wrote:
> Dear Sir/Madam,
> 
> I am writing this email to report a bug from od command. I am working in bioinformatics research filed, and currently I am trying to convert phred scores from fastq format file to Ascii values, and met weird things. For example, when I try to convert 100 characters into ASCII values, if the last 30 characters are the same, it only return part of values, NOT the complete values.
> The example is listed below:
> If there is very long poly-# string, then below 100 characters only return 84 ASCII values.
> 
> $ echo '=:?D+AAB<B?DCAFEBAF?GHIBGFGCDGBGAFG8CF?F?D=DG?BFHG=@77C#############################################' | od -An -t dC
>    61   58   63   68   43   65   65   66   60   66   63   68   67   65   70   69
>    66   65   70   63   71   72   73   66   71   70   71   67   68   71   66   71
>    65   70   71   56   67   70   63   70   63   68   61   68   71   63   66   70
>    72   71   61   64   55   55   67   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35
>    35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35
> *
>    35   35   35   35   10

This behavior is documented, and required by POSIX.
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/od.html

If you don't want elision of identical lines, then you must use the -v
option.

As this is working as intended, and is just usage error on your part,
I'm marking this as not a bug.  Feel free to add further comments or
questions to this report, though.

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