From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Apr 30 12:44:46 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from vimfuego.saarinen.org (saarinen.org [203.79.82.14]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B54A337B423 for ; Mon, 30 Apr 2001 12:44:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from juha@saarinen.org) Received: from dendennis.saarinen.org ([192.168.1.2] helo=dendennis) by vimfuego.saarinen.org with smtp (Exim 3.22 #1 (Red Hack)) id 14uJb5-0002ND-00; Tue, 01 May 2001 07:44:39 +1200 From: "Juha Saarinen" To: "Donn Miller" Cc: Subject: RE: tail Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 07:44:08 +1200 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) In-Reply-To: <3AED6781.8746018D@cvzoom.net> Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I was going to let this one go, but... :: Like so many people before you already explained, doing tail on a :: directory IS useful in some rare situations, like for example, using :: tar, and certain other things. Note the "rare situations" -- it's not useful when you make a typo, or a mistake. :: Remember, a directory is treated as a :: regular file on unix filesystems. Not sure about this; if you e.g. vi a directory, it will warn you that it isn't a "regular file". :: I see no reason to correct tail's :: behavior. If you sit there and do `tail' on a directory all day long, :: then you've got problems. Surely, you might want to modifiy cat's :: behavior, because some poor unsuspecting user might get some ugly :: garbage printed to his terminal when he does 'cat' on a disk device. So the best thing to do is to keep the current behaviour for tail et al, but make it accessible through a flag. Most of the time, that behaviour isn't desirable, hence it should only be invoked if you really need it. -- Juha To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message