Re: wc v. 4.5.3

[Bob Proulx]

Jeff Martens wrote:
> wc version 4.5.3 is produces the following error message:

Thank you for taking the time to report this problem.

> wc: /mnt/floppy/teaching.pdf:2447: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide 
> character
> 
> wc is supposed to count lines, words, and bytes, and so should not
> even be aware that it's reading multibyte characters.  Thus, this
> error message indicates an error condition within wc, and not an
> issue with the input data.  I've gone to a more useful version of
> wc, but it'd be nice to have correct behavior in the standard
> distribution.

Version 4.5.3 is rather old.  Would you be able to upgrade to a newer
version and try again?  I can't reproduce your problem.

Latest test release:
    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.1.2.tar.gz   (6.2MB)
    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.1.2.tar.bz2  (4.1MB)

Latest stable release:
    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)

Also, I suspect locales are affecting this.  Can you try unsetting
LANG or setting LC_ALL=C and seeing if that solves the problem?

  LC_ALL=C wc teaching.pdf

Bob