From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Wed, 3 May 2017 10:57:07 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins In-Reply-To: References: <201705030052.v430qp2K004255@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: below... On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 8:59 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Tue, 2 May 2017, Doug McIlroy wrote: > > > With Steve's eloquent grump and cat -v on the table, I can't help > > re-citing the peerless cardinal sin of > > less --help | wc > To Doug -- touché > Speaking of "cat", what really drives me nuts is "cat file | cmd"... > > What's wrong with "cmd < file" (or to really confuse newbies, "< file > cmd")? Not to be argumentative, but Dave, please be careful. I agree that idiom is misused, but there are times when I think it is appropriate, which is one of the reason why I love the Unix guiding principle of not "forcing" the user to do one thing or another because we know better, but letting education and good 'taste' be the guide. ​I think Justice Potter Stewart describe​d pornography of knowing it when he sees it. IMO: there are time when using cat is in better taste that a file redirection. For instance, I can think of a few examples when I need to direct input from multiple files, using a more complex 'wye' style pipe line or a redirection from backward quotes, that the cat foo sequence seems like its easier to understand/debug. [Maybe it shows my inner schizophrenia and heard voices from multiple places that I kinda like the 'wye' command]. Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: