From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <200910052204.aa92451@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> References: <20091005192428.GA24445@nipl.net> <200910052204.aa92451@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 17:13:45 -0500 Message-ID: From: Jason Catena To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Re: [9fans] mishandling empty lists - let's fix it Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7ff787aa-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > If you really want to fix the problem then the sensible thing > to do would be to write new versions of many utilities, with new > names, and then write a shell without globbing. =A0For new scripts > you would use the new utilities and shell and leave everything > else as it is. =A0Is it worth the effort? =A0That's a question which > can only be answered by the person who would be doing the work. I see the point of having utilities handle no-input without failing and without error output (other than maybe a status to test the case), when their output is used as input to other utilities, especially as embedded commands on the command line. I often use the backtick style to output into an assignment to *, to separate with $1 etc. Currently if a program fails, then instead of no output (maybe ok, depending on the program) it delivers a noisy error message and an exit status. This style is not the most common use case: most people mean to change the state of the system when they run a command, and want to see error messages when a list turns up empty. So I'd welcome commands which behave the new way, and I wouldn't have a problem calling them by other names. (My first thought was the suffix 0. You might want to avoid the prefix g.) > John Stalker Jason Catena