Re: head bug

[Jim Meyering]

Brent Wood <address@hidden> wrote:
> I was using the command
>
> cat $FILE | head -1 | wc -w
>
> to get the number of words (columns) in a line of a file
>
> This worked until the number of words got over a certain number (I haven't
> checked to find out where, but it looks like about 10,000)

Thanks for the report.
There should be no effective limit.
What version are you using? (what does `head --version' output?)
If it's older than coreutils-5.0, please get a more recent
version and try that.

STABLE
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.bz2
  (coreutils is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)

BETA
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.gz
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.bz2

If you can still reproduce the problem, even with the latest package,
please send me the output of your command:

  cat $FILE | tail -1