Re: bug in seq?

[Eric Blake]

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According to Thomas Graf on 3/20/2007 7:00 PM:
> description: seperator string with null bytes gives different outputs
> 
> $ seq -s"" 1 5
> 112131415
> $ seq -s "" 1 5
> 12345
> 
> it looks strang for me.

Cockpit error.  The argument for -s is mandatory, but by shell parsing
rules, you have just invoked "seq" "-s" "1" "5".  Therefore, "1" is the
argument to -s, and given only one argument to seq, as if you had done
'seq --separator=1 -- 5'.  Therefore, seq did what you asked, and printed
from 1 through 5 (it defaults to starting at 1 when there is only one
argument instead of two), with each digit also separated by the string "1".

If you actually want a NUL byte as the separator in the output, you will
have to do something like:

$ printf '%s\0' `seq 1 5`

since seq has no notion of understanding escape sequences, and since there
is no way to pass NUL to an application from the command line without the
use of escape sequences.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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