On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 08:37:14PM +0100, you wrote:
In what case would that misbehave?
Don't know, don't want to find out; it's just not what cat is there for. Among other things, I'd assume it's a nightmare for UTF-8. If nothing else, it's a whole unnecessary code path that needs to be maintained, which can be the source of new exciting bugs, which can slow things down and get in the way, and which has absolutely nothing to do with the functionality cat is expected to provide. (And why stop with cat? Why not cram the same irrelevant functionality into *every* program which might output something to a terminal? dd could use it, head, tail, fmt, cut, tac (obviously), what else? Maybe we should find a way to make sure that nothing is allowed to display anything to a terminal unless it has filtered out any potentially annoying things? Maybe it would be easier to make the terminal itself filter the content, unless a program sends some kind of complicated out of band message that it will filter the content? Hmm--that actually sounds like a better/more viable approach than modifying every single program ever written to use stdout.)
Mike Stone -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
