std-unix@ut-sally.UUCP (Moderator, John Quarterman) (01/18/87)
From: colonel@sunybcs.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman) Date: 12 Jan 87 15:18:10 GMT Organization: Jack of Clubs Precision Instruments > From: hoptoad!gnu@lll-crg.arpa (John Gilmore) > Date: Sat, 27 Dec 86 02:57:15 PST > > ... Tail should be in the mandatory set of commands. I know that tail is in BSD. Is it a Berkeley product? There's one thing about it I don't like. When you type "tail +10c" you get all characters starting with the tenth. Now, that's un-Unixican. Characters start at 0, and perhaps blocks and lines should too. As it is, if I want a shell command or expression in the argument, I usually have to add 1 to it to make it work. I'd like to see a program that does what tail does, except that if you say "tail +n" it skips the first n units. You could call it something else--maybe "trail." And how about a "head" with the same syntax as tail/trail? ("head xx file; tail xx file" = "cat file") -- Col. G. L. Sicherman UU: ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel CS: colonel@buffalo-cs BI: colonel@sunybcs, csdsiche@ubvms Volume-Number: Volume 9, Number 20
std-unix@ut-sally.UUCP (01/28/87)
From: decwrl!nsc!nsc!nsta!instable.ether!amos (Amos Shapir) Date: Mon, 19 Jan 87 16:54:53 -0200 Organization: National Semiconductor (Israel) Ltd. >From: colonel@sunybcs.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman) >I'd like to see a program that does what tail does, except that if >you say "tail +n" it skips the first n units. You could call it >something else--maybe "trail." And how about a "head" with the same >syntax as tail/trail? ("head xx file; tail xx file" = "cat file") Try 'dd bs=n skip=1' - actually, what you need is a 'line' modifier to dd, in addition to chars, blocks and k. -- Amos Shapir National Semiconductor (Israel) 6 Maskit st. P.O.B. 3007, Herzlia 46104, Israel (011-972) 52-522261 amos%nsta@nsc 34.48'E 32.10'N Volume-Number: Volume 9, Number 25
std-unix@ut-sally.UUCP (01/30/87)
From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris) Date: 29 Jan 87 07:20:35 GMT Reply-To: guy@sun.UUCP (Guy Harris) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View >>From: colonel@sunybcs.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman) >>I'd like to see a program that does what tail does, except that if >>you say "tail +n" it skips the first n units. sed -n '<n>,$p' will do the job quite nicely. >>And how about a "head" with the same syntax as tail/trail? >>("head xx file; tail xx file" = "cat file") > >Try 'dd bs=n skip=1' - actually, what you need is a 'line' modifier to >dd, in addition to chars, blocks and k. Well, 4BSD has such a "head" command, and writing one for systems lacking it would probably take less work than adding a "line" modifier to "dd" (which would be totally inappropriate for "dd", just as "-v" is inappropriate for "cat"). On the other hand, sed -n '1,<n>p' will do the job quite nicely here, too. (I suspect it may still read the rest of the file, but sticking in optimizations to avoid this are left as an exercise to the reader.) Let's not use 1003.2 as a chance to add every feature we want to some UNIX command, or to tweak their behavior to fit something that seemed convenient one day last month, or to add our favorite command. The commands standardized in 1003.2 should be *tools* - such as, to pick a random example, "sed". Volume-Number: Volume 9, Number 35