From owner-freebsd-bugs Sat Nov 18 6: 2:27 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1DE7937B479 for ; Sat, 18 Nov 2000 06:02:25 -0800 (PST) Received: from walton.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 18 Nov 2000 14:02:24 +0000 (GMT) To: George Reid Cc: Steve Bano , freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Shell or FreeBSD bug? In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 18 Nov 2000 13:54:56 GMT." X-Request-Do: Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 14:02:23 +0000 From: David Malone Message-ID: <200011181402.aa57636@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> Sender: owner-freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > I'm not sure of the logic of being able to cat directories directly - > doing so will list filenames (among the garbage) which don't reside in the > directory cat'ted, but rather in it's subdirectories. Patch follows. Am I > on crack, and is there a useful reason for catting a directory? We sometimes use cat, head and tail on directories here 'cos we have some perl scripts that know how to decode directory contents. There are some PRs that discuss what standards such as POSIX say about this too. Personally, I'd be in favor of leaving things the way ther are. As it says in the perl book: "In accord with the Unix philosophy, Perl gives you enough rope to hang yourself." David. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message