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Re: cat - -
From: |
James Youngman |
Subject: |
Re: cat - - |
Date: |
Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:26:31 +0000 |
On Jan 16, 2008 12:01 AM, <address@hidden> wrote:
> Yes yes. I'm just saying supposing a theoretical new user's first
> encounter with all this stuff was the document trail that started with
> the cat man page, then he would think "-" was broken.
The best place to document this could well be a new-user document.
Explaining that once you've read all the data from a pipe, you can't
rewind it, and explaining that in one place is probably more helpful
than stating it as a caveat on the handling of "-" in hundreds of
utilities. Such a document would also be a good place to explain the
handling of wildcards and so forth too. But the main problem is to
figure out where to put such a document so that new users will
actually read it. What do you think?
> So still an understanding of Unix is implied as the docs perhaps
> describe 95% but not yet 100% of what one needs to know.
I think exposition of general principles probably belongs somewhere else.
James.