Subject: Re: bug#19969: problem: wc -c doesn't read actual # of bytes in file

From: Jim Meyering <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2015 09:18:10 -0800

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 12:59 AM, Linda Walsh <[email-masked]> wrote:
> (coreutils-8.21-7.7.7)
>
> wc -c(bytes) doesn't seem to reliably read the number
> of bytes in a file.
>
> I was wanting to find out what the largest data-source
> files in '/proc' and '/sys' (didn't get around to trying
> /sys, since all the files under /proc/sys return 0 bytes.
>
> Note -- "wc -l" doesn't return '0' on the /proc/sys files.
>
> As root:
> # cd /proc
> # find -H [^0-9]* -name self -prune -o -name thread-self -prune -o -type f !
> -name kmsg ! -name kcore ! -name kpagecount ! -name kpageflags -print0|wc -c
> --files0-from=- |sort -n

Thanks for the report.
However, with wc from coreutils-8.23 and a 3.10 kernel, this is no
longer an issue.