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From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: /dev/stdin:  why not call it "-"?
Message-ID: <2683@ncoast.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 20-Jun-87 16:18:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: ncoast.2683
Posted: Sat Jun 20 16:18:49 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jun-87 12:06:27 EDT
References: <7359@brl-adm.ARPA> <5856@brl-smoke.ARPA> <15318@onfcanim.UUCP> <1098@hropus.UUCP> <414@murphy.UUCP>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards
Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh
Lines: 28

As quoted from <414@murphy.UUCP> by dave@murphy.UUCP (Snipe Hunter):
+---------------
| In article <1098@hropus.UUCP>, ka@hropus.UUCP writes:
| > "-" is certainly easier to type than "/dev/stdin" and is already somewhat
| > of a UN*X convention.
| [code deleted]
| 
| Why not just make the shell recognize "-" by itself as a special argument and
| have it substitute "/dev/stdin"?  The only problem that this would cause that
| I can think of is that you'd have to quote it to use it as the subtraction
| operator to expr, for instance.
+---------------

But what about "tar cvf - dir | compress > dir.tar.Z"?  In this case you would
want "-" to refer to /dev/stdout, no?  And how is the shell to know THAT?
(At least the mod to open() can check to see if the mode is O_RDONLY or
O_WRONLY and use /dev/stdin or /dev/stdout based on the results -- not that I
advocate that implementation.)

++Brandon
-- 
Copyright (C) 1987 Brandon S. Allbery.  Redistribution permitted only if the
    redistributor permits further redistribution.  (Stargate take heed!)
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