On 4/12/06, Ted MacNEIL <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Excuse me? > List/type/cat displays a file to the STDOUT. > > Are you saying that that is an incorrect statement?
Most UNIX comands display their output to STDOUT. The normal behavior of "cat" is to print its *output* to STDOUT. However it's reason d'etre is indicated by its name, short for catenate. It's purpose is to take multiple files and catenate all the input into a single output stream. Many people happen to use it to list the contents of single files, and it works great for that. I happen to prefer "less" for simple text file viewing. Anyway, "cat" was superfluous in the example we are arguing about, because the output of the previous commands was already destined for STDOUT. So using "cat" to read from STDIN and send to STDOUT without any other modification to the data was completely unnecessary. Come to think of it, the whole chain of commands seems contrived and doesn't result in any useful output that I can discern. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
