Re: [9fans] echo -n

["Francisco J Ballesteros" <nemo@lsub.org>]

> Q.  Should pipes preserve zero-length messages?
> A.  Yes.  If you're preserving message boundaries, then it follows
>     that zero-length writes on one end should result in zero-length
>     reads on the other.

But then, this goes against the convention that zero-length read means
eof. This reminds me of the discussion about white space in file names.
File names may have white space in their names, but that makes
it hard (despite quoting) to program using file names as different tokens.

Isn´t it more clean to let zero bytes mean eof?

As you say, there are reasons both for doing and not doing it, but how many
users would be really anoyed if write(X,X,0) did just nothing?
How many programs would really have to be changed?