From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Apr 30 5: 4: 0 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from lurza.secnetix.de (lurza.secnetix.de [212.66.1.130]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3E52E37B424 for ; Mon, 30 Apr 2001 05:03:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from olli@lurza.secnetix.de) Received: (from olli@localhost) by lurza.secnetix.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id OAA40447; Mon, 30 Apr 2001 14:03:50 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from oliver.fromme@secnetix.de) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 14:03:50 +0200 (CEST) Message-Id: <200104301203.OAA40447@lurza.secnetix.de> From: Oliver Fromme To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: tail In-Reply-To: X-Newsgroups: list.freebsd-stable User-Agent: tin/1.5.4-20000523 ("1959") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/4.1-RELEASE (i386)) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Juha Saarinen wrote: > Is there any use for the the garbage tail outputs on a directory? If there > is, I won't say anything else... Just recently the feature that directories can be opened and read like plain files has been very helpful for me, when I was debugging the union mount code and the getdirentries() code in the libc (which, by the way, reads the directory like a plain file and then returns the dirent structures contained in it). You can cat plain text files, binary files, fifos, device nodes -- why should there be a special hack to disallow it for directories? As for the "garbage on screen": Type "cat /kernel". That's much worse. But it does what you asked it to do, and that's how UNIX works, because it assumes that you know what you're doing. Everything else would lead into the area of Windows philosophy ... Just my 2 Euro cents. Regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way. "All that we see or seem is just a dream within a dream" (E. A. Poe) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message