From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16535 invoked from network); 7 Aug 1998 16:08:09 -0000 Received: from math.gatech.edu (list@130.207.146.50) by ns1.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 7 Aug 1998 16:08:09 -0000 Received: (from list@localhost) by math.gatech.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id LAA12044; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 11:50:04 -0400 (EDT) Resent-Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 11:49:54 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199808071552.QAA17661@diamond.tao.co.uk> Subject: Re: Redirection (<>) To: jankr@ifi.uio.no (Jan Kroken) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 16:52:10 +0100 (BST) From: "Zefram" Cc: zsh-users@math.gatech.edu In-Reply-To: from "Jan Kroken" at Aug 7, 98 05:19:54 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Resent-Message-ID: <"3kC6G1.0.gx2.X8oor"@math> Resent-From: zsh-users@math.gatech.edu X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/1707 X-Loop: zsh-users@math.gatech.edu X-Loop: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu Precedence: list Resent-Sender: zsh-workers-request@math.gatech.edu Jan Kroken wrote: >What does <> really mean? It does exactly what it says on the tin. It opens the file for input and output (mode O_RDWR), attaching it to standard input (file descriptor 0). It does absolutely nothing to standard output, or any other file descriptor. You could do "<>foo >&0" to make the same file available as standard output as well, but the standard text utilities would be rather confused by this. It's more useful with character devices, where input and output are largely separate operations, and there's no seek pointer to share. -zefram