Re: Proposed new feature: head --show-truncation

[Ed Avis]

On 18 Aug 2003, Paul Eggert wrote:

[a flag to head(1) to say if it truncated the input]

>Isn't easily programmed as a script?

Well, yes, and I originally wrote a short Perl script 'trunc' for the
job.  But it seemed to make more sense that this function should be in
head itself, since head's job is to truncate data by lines or bytes.

It's well known that many of the classic Unix text-processing
utilities can be implemented in just a few lines of Perl or awk; that
doesn't seem by itself an argument against any particular program or
feature.

A reasonable argument against --show-truncation would be to
demonstrate that it can be done with a trivial shell script wrapping
head itself.

-- 
Ed Avis <address@hidden>