Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site petrus.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!bellcore!petrus!hammond
From: hammond@petrus.UUCP (Rich A. Hammond)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases (absurdly long)
Message-ID: <443@petrus.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Aug-85 08:52:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: petrus.443
Posted: Mon Aug  5 08:52:11 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 6-Aug-85 10:32:43 EDT
References: <2067@ucf-cs.UUCP> <363@cuae2.UUCP> <2423@sun.uucp> <5819@utzoo.UUCP>, <5852@utzoo.UUCP> <9638@ucbvax.ARPA>
Organization: Bell Communications Research, Inc
Lines: 15

I like the idea of not making ls onto a tty default to multi-column.
I (very infrequently) want to do something like "ls|tee foo" and I always
get bitten by the Berkeley bug that ls then does a different thing.
With the csh and aliases, ls shouldn't bother trying to be smart, let
the user alias l to ls -CF or whatever she wants.

As for the comment about pr doing multi-column output being undesirable,
since pr is a paginator, think about it for a minute and explain how
you would take a single column file and make it into multiple columns
such that the second column on the first page started with the line
that follows the last one on the first column without knowing how long
the page was?  Since the columnizing program also has to know the page
length and width, I see some justification for it all being in one program.

Rich Hammond