Re: [9fans] mishandling empty lists - let's fix it

[John Stalker <stalker@maths.tcd.ie>]

> I prefer my version to your versions. I can see uses for them already.
>
> ron

So do I, though I'm not sure I would have called the latter "my"
versions.  That's not the point however.  Since I don't seem to
been have sufficiently clear, I'll reword it a bit:

 There are a lot basic UNIX/p9 utilities which treat empty lists
 inconsistently.  It would be nice if there were fewer, but you
 can't arrange that without breaking many things.

The list I gave was what you would get by looking through /bin on
a BSD system and making empty lists behave like other lists, just
empty.  Most of your list would, in fact, be more useful, but of
of course break even more existing scripts.

I think you got one wrong, however.
>> `cat' would concatenate 0 files, i.e. ouptut nothing,
>cat would copy stdin to stdout
How do you perform the original, concatenating, function of
cat with this version?  With "my" version I can type `cat -'
or at worst `cat /dev/fd/0' to replicate the behaviour of
"your" version.  An idea more along the lines of your others
would be that cat reads a list of files on stdin and
concatentes their contents to stdout.

--
John Stalker
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
tel +353 1 896 1983
fax +353 1 896 2282