Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!leah!wfh58
From: wfh58@leah.Albany.Edu (William F. Hammond)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Pipes
Summary: '*' and '|' are similar in a way
Message-ID: <3150@leah.Albany.Edu>
Date: 9 Jun 90 22:04:33 GMT
References: <2533@zipeecs.umich.edu> <136735@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1990Jun6.104643.15176@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <12391@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Reply-To: wfh58@leah.albany.edu.UUCP (William F. Hammond)
Organization: Dept of Math & Stat, SUNYA, Albany, NY
Lines: 30

In article <12391@cbmvax.commodore.com> daveh@cbmvax (Dave Haynie) writes:
> . . .
>The "|" character certainly does make things easier.  In any case, Chuck's
>bottom line is correct, get WShell.  WShell interprets " | " as a pipe, 
>knows about "&" at the end of the line, and does a bunch of other things
>extremely well.  The only shell I use when I can help it.
> . . .
>As pointed out many times here before, the Amiga regular expression language
>is far more powerful than the other models available at the time.  Now you're
>really the one talking syntactic sugar.  Sure, "*" could be substituted for
>"#?", but what do you substitute for FILE#(A|B|C#E??).(C|O), or a similar 
>AmigaDOS pattern?  The only thing that comes close is the grep language,
> . . .
The "*" has peacefully co-existed with all of the standard Amiga pattern
matching characters in the ARP world for quite a time now.  Yes, the
standard Amiga pattern matching language is more powerful.  But 90+% of my
pattern matching is the '*' kind, and 99.999% of my CPU time is wasted by
my clumsy typing at the keyboard.  So anything that helps to recover that
wasted CPU time is worthwhile.

Likewise with piping.  I can only handle one outgoing stream with the '|'
symbol (invoking ConMan's "PIP:"), whereas I can handle multiple streams
with "PIPE:".  But wiring a single piped stream with "PIPE:" takes lots
of typing -- lots more than simply typing '|'.  And 90+% of my piping is
single-stream.

>-- 
>Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests"
>   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: hazy     BIX: hazy
>	"I have been given the freedom to do as I see fit" -REM