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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