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Autzoo.1430 net.bugs.v7 utcsrgv!utzoo!henry Wed Feb 24 21:37:58 1982 wc verbosity The wc program is not half as useful as it should be, because it runs off at the mouth. It insists on printing a filename even if it was given only one argument; moreover, it inserts blanks to make its output look nice, and insists on inserting them even if only a partial output is requested. The result is that a shell program which simply wants to count the lines in a file cannot use wc directly; it must process the output through a sed filter or the equivalent to strip out the babble and get a single clean number.

It is easy to fix wc so that (a) it prints filenames only if there is more than one file, and (b) it uses tabs rather than fixed fields for output formatting, and suppresses them when they are not needed. The resulting program doesn't yield quite as elegant an output format, but is much more useful as a TOOL. (And if I want elegant output, I'll run it through tbl anyway...). Here are the changes (line numbers may be off a bit from the V7 distribution version):

53,54c55,56 1) { if(argc>2) { > printf("\t%s\n", argv[i]); 64c66 printf("\ttotal\n"); 75c77,79 printf("%ld", linect); > if (*wd != '\0') > putchar('\t'); 79c83,85 printf("%ld", wordct); > if (*wd != '\0') > putchar('\t'); 83c89,91 printf("%ld", charct); > if (*wd != '\0') > putchar('\t');

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