From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Apr 29 23:59:23 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 6452037B422 for ; Sun, 29 Apr 2001 23:59:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 30066 invoked by uid 100); 30 Apr 2001 06:59:19 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15085.3399.399194.624320@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 01:59:19 -0500 To: "Juha Saarinen" Cc: "Dan Langille" , "Chris Byrnes" , Subject: RE: tail In-Reply-To: References: <15085.1672.680397.456359@guru.mired.org> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Juha Saarinen types: > :: The real issue is why should a command raise an error for no good > :: reason. Either a kernel panic or a message is a bit extreme just > :: because a user issued a command that someone else thinks is > :: unusual. Until you can prove that there is no use for the output of > :: tail on a directory, adding code to tail to generate an error in that > :: case is silly. > > If you are a typist with 100% accuracy, there is of course no need for any > error handling in any program. > > Is there any use for the the garbage tail outputs on a directory? If there > is, I won't say anything else... Yes, there is. If you're monitoring a programm that creates a lot of files in a previously empty directory (for example, extracting a tar file into it), then: tail -f targetdir will do the trick, though it would be better to clean up the output (cat -v, maybe). Deciding for the users what actions are an error and which aren't is a *really* nasty habit. Windows does it all to often, which is one of the reasons Windows sucks. Linux - at least some distributions - seems to have picked up the habit from Windows. Oh well. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message