Bash quirk?

AMMullan · 02-06-2004, 07:05 PM

K here's an interesting thing I just found (bags not manually counting words lol)...

if you run either of these you would expect the same result, right?

Code:

wc -w foo.c

cat foo.c | tr ' ' '\n' | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'

but if you run it on a big file it gives you a complete different number... (i.e. I have a project I'm writing, the 1st statement gives me 315 words, the second 602...)

Is there any difference in the statements?

h/w · 02-06-2004, 07:29 PM

cat foo.c | tr -s ' ' '\n' | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'

snacky · 02-06-2004, 07:30 PM

well done :-)

h/w · 02-06-2004, 08:05 PM

i like snacks too, fank you.

AMMullan · 02-06-2004, 08:16 PM

k well that gave me 330 words (compared to wc -w with 315) - wonder what wc counts?

I have a feeling wc might leave out symbols or something...