WC.TTP:		Count characters, words and lines in (a) file(s)

by David Megginson, 1991
Released into the Public Domain

Usage:	wc [-cwl] [files...]

INTRODUCTION

Here is my version of wc(1) for the Atari ST. I have tested this
version against the one which comes with Dave Beckemeyer's MT C-Shell,
and the results seem to be identical (if there are bugs, we share
them), although my output format is slightly different. wc takes three
options:

-c	Count characters
-w	Count words
-l	Count lines

If no options are given, wc will count all three. If there are no
arguments after the options, wc will read from stdin; otherwise, it
will read from each of the files supplied on the command line, where
"-" stands for stdin.

SPEED

For the sake of speed, I bypass the high-level i/o functions and read
in large chunks of a file at once (this is portable to Unix and MSDOS,
by the way). The default buffer size is 50000 bytes, but you can change
it in the Makefile by adding -DBUFFER_SIZE=<whatever>. The bigger the
buffer, the faster wc, but also the more memory wasted (remember, the
ST is a MULTITASKING machine now, so we can't use Malloc(-1L) to grab
all available memory any more without risking flames). This buffering
system makes my wc about 5-6 times faster than D.B.'s: in the test I
ran (10 1,000-line text files), my wc took 28 seconds, while D.B.'s
took 163 seconds. This version should work with MT C-Shell, which is
still a very nice package (I ran the test on the old release; the new
wc might be faster).

THOSE PESKY CARRIAGE RETURNS

For some brain-damaged reason (MSDOS,CP/M compatibility, I imagine),
the ST uses "\r\n" to mark the end of a line instead of "\n" like in
Unix. Many of us have recompiled programs to avoid this, but the problem
of compatibility still remains. Use the -DSKIP_CR flag in the Makefile
to handle '\r' correctly (I have done this for the distribution binary).

WHAT DOES THIS COST?

Nothing, of course. After Eric Smith created MiNT and made it free to
the public, how could I live with myself if I tried to make this
shareware? Besides, I spent only an hour or two on it. Do feel free
to post glowing messages about me to the net, though... :-)

REVISION NUMBER

You can check the revision number of your wc.ttp binaries using the
RCS ident(1) command. If you don't have A. Pratt's excellent port of
RCS for the Atari ST, GET IT!

USING THE SOURCE

This program is in the Public Domain, _not_ under the Gnu licensing
agreement. As a result, you may incorporate it (re-compiled) into
commercial packages without charge, although I would like a little
credit somewhere in the documentation. The source is (I hope) good
ANSI, and you will need an ANSI compiler and ANSI header files to
recompile it (I use the Gnu C compiler and Eric Smith's MiNT library
for GCC on the Atari ST).