Re: Bug in cat

[Micah Cowan]

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Cutler, David wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My execution environment is
>    CYGWIN_NT-5.1 DCUTLER 1.5.24(0.156/4/2) 2007-01-31 10:57 i686 Cygwin
>    (dual core, 2.0 GHz cpu with 2GB ram Compaq NW8440 Laptop)
> 
> When I downloaded Cygwin, I specified the use of DOS line terminators.
> 
> I found a bug in what I suspect is cat when used with a simple bash shell 
> script.
> 
> It's common to place a set of names into a file (one name per line) and then 
> use a for loop to walk through the list.
> 
> For example:
> 
> If a file named list contains
> a001s2
> a002s2
> a003s2
> a004s2
> a005s2
> a006s2
> 
> And you execute the command:
>    for I in `cat list` ; do echo \"${i}\" ; done
> 
> The output is
> "a001s2
> "a002s2
> "a003s2
> "a004s2
> "a005s2
> "a006s2

Echo is printing literal "\r"s from the DOS-style CR LF line
terminators. Your terminal is interpreting "\r" (rightly) as "move to
the beginning of the current line."

Cat is just spitting out the file's contents. It's not going to read
them as "lines", just as data to spit out. If there's a bug, it's not
with cat. Talk to the Cygwin folks to find out what's going on. I don't
know, but it's possible something like

  cat list | while read -r I; do echo \"$I\" ; done

(which is more "line oriented") will work better for you. Either way,
there's not much we can do for you here. Cat is just doing its job.

- --
HTH,
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/

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