Re: non-POSIX behavior from wc(1)

[Ignatios Souvatzis <is%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 08:36:26PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 01:20:13PM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> > 
> > On NetBSD 6, one gets wc output with pleasing spaces
> > 
> > $ wc -l unison.log cmake.diff
> >        1 unison.log
> >       58 cmake.diff
> >       59 total
> > $ wc unison.log cmake.diff
> >        1       7      45 unison.log
> >       58     168    2461 cmake.diff
> >       59     175    2506 total
> > $
> > 
> > But POSIX says:
> > 
> >    "%d %d %d %s\n", <newlines>, <words>, <bytes>, <file>
> > 
> > which does not have extra spaces.  This only matters if you write code
> > to parse the output based on the spec:
> > 
> >   http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/wc.html
> > 
> > So it seems we should adjust wc(1) to note the extra spaces, since it
> > seems unlikely that we would come to consensus on fixing it.
> 
> That sounds like a good candidate for POSIX_MISTAKES... Stripping white
> spaces is one of the most obvious things to start from.

Note that the cited format string will happily scanf output with 
extra spaces.

	-is
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