Re: PATCH: stat option to set hash

[Phil Pennock <phil@athenaeum.demon.co.uk>]

Typing away merrily, Peter Stephenson produced the immortal words:
> > It seems to me
> > anomalous that stat primarily generates textual output.
> 
> There's text and there's binary and...?

It's more a case of how well it integrates into everything else.  If you
look at most of zsh's builtins and stuff, text output is used for status
stuff, job status, requesting confirmation, tabs-stuff and zle
generally.  Aside from explicit print/echo and read not much causes the
shell to produce data rather than user-fluff on stdout/err.  select
comes to mind, and pwd (which could as well be a shell wrapper around
print and $PWD).  User-fluff includes whence and internal status
reporting stuff.

Normally zsh acts as a filter controller, not a data-source beyond basic
user-input stuff.  I know I'm not important in zsh development, but it
just feels wrong when I see stat shove stuff to stdout.

I know, I'm not expressing this very well.  It's just... feel.
-- 
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