Subject: bug#33281: head does not consume input after '-c' is satisfied

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2018 11:52:25 -0800

On 11/5/18 1:17 PM, Philip Rowlands wrote:
> To achieve consistency in the other direction, head could ignore the optimization to reduce the number of bytes read, and always read 8192 bytes, knowing that some would be discarded.

Let's not do that. It's less efficient and less useful than what GNU 
'head -c4' is doing now.

> For widely differing values, the only way to produce the same residual output would be to consume all input data.

Eeuuww. Let's *especially* not do that.