From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Apr 29 20:03:59 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id UAA28262 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 29 Apr 1997 20:03:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from CU-SeeMe.educ.utas.edu.au (cu-seeme.educ.utas.edu.au [144.6.16.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA28255 for ; Tue, 29 Apr 1997 20:03:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (iaint@localhost) by CU-SeeMe.educ.utas.edu.au (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id NAA00963; Wed, 30 Apr 1997 13:04:10 +1000 (EST) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 1997 13:04:10 +1000 (EST) From: Iain Templeton To: Steve Howe cc: freebsd-questions Subject: Re: no pipes allowed In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, Steve Howe wrote: > > why is it that some commands like "ls" and "which" won't accept pipes? > > echo /etc | ls (will just list the current directory, not /etc) > echo ppp | which (does nothing ... no /usr/sbin/ppp) I think the problem here is that the programs do not read their std input for the file names, they look at the command line arguments. Using ls `echo /etc` would work, but thats probably not what you need. i.