wc(1) Output and POSIX

[Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi,

Looking at the POSIX man page [1] for wc(1) it seems to suggest that
its output should be of the form:

"%d %d %d %s\n", <newlines>, <words>, <bytes>, <file>

However, we seem to do something like:

" %7lu %7lu %7lu %s\n"  <newlines>, <words>, <bytes>, <file>

(Notice the leading space)
Looking around, it seems other systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD) also have
similar output. I am just curious about the reason for the difference
in the output, the CVS history tells that the output has always been
like this :-)


[1]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/wc.html

-
Abhinav