Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 08:54:16 -0700 From: Chris Pressey <cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: mikael.karlsson@hel.fi Subject: Re: Cat a directory Message-ID: <20030922085416.605aca6b.cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> In-Reply-To: <JA8AAAAAAgMHPAABYQADV7qgzdhU@master.hel.fi> References: <JA8AAAAAAgH8RAABYQADV7qgzdhU@master.hel.fi> <20030919083627.K99065@wonkity.com> <JA8AAAAAAgMHPAABYQADV7qgzdhU@master.hel.fi>
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On 22 Sep 2003 09:06:00 +0300
"Karlsson Mikael HKI/SOSV" <mikael.karlsson@hel.fi> wrote:
> [...]
> Ruben de Groot wrote (19.9.2003 13:34):
> >
> >So why don't you for example alias cat to cat -v in your system
> >profile and login scripts? This will display non-printing characters
> >so they are visible and don't mangle terminal settings.
>
> So it's better for a newbie to get understandable jibrish from cat
> when run on directories then an error message stating that they are
> trying to run cat on a directory like ls says when they try to run ls
> on a file. But as I said earlier who cares, right? Other OSs have only
> had this for "a couple" of year so why would we!!!
Mikael,
Please understand that FreeBSD is more oriented towards classicists,
luddites, and other sticks-in-the-mud, than propellerhead "early
adopter" users-to-be-friendly-to. (At least, it used to be; I honestly
have no idea what's going on in 5.x these days.)
Anyway, why not write a script for these users along the lines of:
#!/usr/bin/perl
foreach $f (@ARGV)
{
if (-d $f) {
print "cat: $f: is a directory\n";
exit 1;
}
}
system "cat @ARGV";
Also, I believe 'GNU ls', in the ports, supports coloured directory
listings.
-Chris
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