On Fri, 6 Oct 2017 09:57 am, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: [quoting Bart] >>> Yes, I tried typing 'sort' in Linux, where it apparently hangs (same >>> on Windows actually). The reason: because it might have killed >>> someone to have added a message saying what you are expected to type >>> and how to end it. (Namely, press Ctrl-D start at the start of a line >>> in Linux, and Ctrl-Z followed by Enter, I think also at the start, in >>> Windows.)
Waiting for input isn't "hangs". That's an ignorant and foolish thing to say, more suited for a wet-behind-the-ears newbie than somebody who claims to be a long-time old-school programmer. [Greg] >> How to signal EOF from the keyboard is a fundamental piece of >> knowledge about the OS. Indeed. The Unix commandline interface is not designed to be user-friendly for newbies (or experts, for that matter). It is terse, often *painfully* so (would it have killed the author to have spelled `umount` correctly?), the UI is inconsistent, and it has a very steep learning curve -- a lot of effort is required to make a little bit of progress. But even a dilettante Unix user like me knows how to signal EOF. It is one of a handful of indispensable skills you need to use Unix effectively, just as you can't use Windows effectively without knowing how to right-click. Some things you just have to learn. [Marko] > As for informational messages, it is part of deep-seated Unix culture to > have quiet commands. The purpose of the silence is so you can easily > compose new commands out of existing commands via pipelines and scripts. > It would be inconvenient if you typed the command: > > grep ython message.txt | sort > > and the sort command instructed you to press Ctrl-D. Indeed it would. But in fairness, if the author of the `sort` command had a commitment to friendliness in their programs, they could have `sort` only print a message when it is reading from stdin and writing to stdout, much as `ls` defaults to outputting control characters but automatically swaps to replacing them with ? when writing to a terminal. I believe that even Unix experts would be more effective with a judicious amount of not so much hand-holding as gentle guidance. Even experts aren't expert on every single command line tool. But the OS is what it is, and the culture has a certain level of commandline machismo, so that's unlikely to change. -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list