/dev/fd device driver to be posted

John R. MacMillan john at hcr.UUCP
Wed Jul 5 06:45:44 AEST 1989


In article <MFNA0001 at kenobi.commodore.com> ford at kenobi.UUCP writes:
|This is primarily useful when running a poorly-written program that
|has no provision for using stdin/stdout.

It's also useful for supporting a feature in KSH88 (and the PD ksh I
use as soon as I get around to it :-)).  I don't have the book handy
but the syntax is something like:

paste (cut -f2 foo) (cut -f1,3 bar) > foobar

And this isn't one of those poorly-written ones, either; you couldn't
do the above with simple linear pipelines.

As an aside on a somewhat religious matter, I've always felt the
convention that "-" means standard input is somewhat gory;
/dev/stdin eliminates the need for this.
-- 
John R. MacMillan        No parking by the sewer sign a hot dog with a
HCR Corporation          razor broke there's water dripping up the spout
{utzoo,utcsri}!hcr!john  but I don't care let it all hang out -- The Nails



More information about the Unix-pc.general mailing list