GNU bug report logs - #33281
head does not consume input after '-c' is satisfied

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Package: coreutils;

Reported by: Luiz Angelo Daros de Luca <luizluca <at> gmail.com>

Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2018 20:34:01 UTC

Severity: wishlist

Tags: wontfix

Done: Assaf Gordon <assafgordon <at> gmail.com>

Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.

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From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Philip Rowlands <phr+coreutils <at> dimebar.com>, 33281 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#33281: head does not consume input after '-c' is satisfied
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.
This bug report was last modified 6 years and 235 days ago.

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