Re: Not so useless use of cat

[Andreas Schwab]

arnold@skeeve.com (Aharon Robbins) writes:

> In article <mailman.8994.1410897983.1147.bug-bash@gnu.org>,
> Chet Ramey  <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
>>On 9/16/14, 3:00 PM, Bob Proulx wrote:
>>
>>> That is one of the reasons I don't like the /dev/std{err,in,out}
>>> things.  They are not portable.  They do different things on different
>>> systems.  I avoid them.
>>
>>I've considered emulating it everywhere, regardless of what the OS
>>provides, but I'd get just as many complaints if I did that.
>>
>>Chet
>
> This is what gawk does. I haven't had any complaints about this,
> and once you do it that way you can claim that Bash is being consistent
> across all systems.  (That's one of the reasons I did it that way.)

AWK can do that since it has full control over the files it accesses.
Bash doesn't have that, it needs to coexist with programs that open the
files themselves.  It cannot emulate "foo -o /dev/stdin"  to make it the
same as "foo >/dev/stdin".

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SUSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
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"And now for something completely different."