On 22 Sep 2003 09:06:00 +0300 "Karlsson Mikael HKI/SOSV" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...] > Ruben de Groot wrote (19.9.2003 13:34): > > > >So why don't you for example alias cat to cat -v in your system > >profile and login scripts? This will display non-printing characters > >so they are visible and don't mangle terminal settings. > > So it's better for a newbie to get understandable jibrish from cat > when run on directories then an error message stating that they are > trying to run cat on a directory like ls says when they try to run ls > on a file. But as I said earlier who cares, right? Other OSs have only > had this for "a couple" of year so why would we!!! Mikael, Please understand that FreeBSD is more oriented towards classicists, luddites, and other sticks-in-the-mud, than propellerhead "early adopter" users-to-be-friendly-to. (At least, it used to be; I honestly have no idea what's going on in 5.x these days.) Anyway, why not write a script for these users along the lines of: #!/usr/bin/perl foreach $f (@ARGV) { if (-d $f) { print "cat: $f: is a directory\n"; exit 1; } } system "cat @ARGV"; Also, I believe 'GNU ls', in the ports, supports coloured directory listings. -Chris _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"