Subject: bug#22236: Not exactly a bug...

From: Todd Shandelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2015 12:37:57 -0600

Hi,

I love your products.

I am using the 'uniq' command line utility on Cygwin, where I do most of my
development work.

$ uniq --version
uniq (GNU coreutils) 8.24
Packaged by Cygwin (8.24-3)
Copyright (C) 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Richard M. Stallman and David MacKenzie.
$

I feel confused about the usage options, particularly those for restricting
comparison to a limited number of initial or non-initial characters or
fields.

Observe:

$ uniq --h|egrep 'char|field'
  -f, --skip-fields=N   avoid comparing the first N fields
  -s, --skip-chars=N    avoid comparing the first N characters
  -w, --check-chars=N   compare no more than N characters in lines

...
...
...

So it looks like that for *chars*, 'uniq' has options to compare only the
first N chars, or *all but* the first N chars.

Whereas for *fields*, 'uniq' has only the option to skip the first N
fields, but has no corresponding option to compare *only* the first N
fields.

Why this lack of symmetry? And what do I do when I need that missing
functionality, to compare *only *an initial subset of fields in each line?

Ot, am I missing something?

Thanks!

Todd Shandelman
Houston, Texas