7 Apr
2008
7 Apr
'08
11:37 a.m.
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
John Floren wrote:
something, but why? If you don't get any errors, the
Well, programmers are the only ones that matter, right? ;)
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
That's bull. There are ways to make grep
output something like "No
matches" without breaking a pipeline that uses it. I suggest that
perhaps those who say "They're the kind of thing people who don't
use or understand pipes will say." are the ones who truly don't
understand pipes.
No news is good news. Sure, you could make grep blather all over stderr or program completed correctly. If you screwed up
the syntax or
specified a nonexistent file, you get an error. However, since GNU
tools are so utterly goddamn broken, this may or may not be the case
on any given tool. Try Plan 9 some time and you'll have a lovely
experience... for example, see
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/cat for
the proper way to
implement cat.
I've played with Plan 9, and it's a definite improvement over UNIX,
especially in areas of consistency, but both seem to be more
programmer-oriented than user-oriented.
Peace... Sridhar