From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Nov 17 15:56:22 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from iguana.skymind.com (adsl-216-103-84-145.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net [216.103.84.145]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E2DB137B479 for ; Fri, 17 Nov 2000 15:56:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost.skymind.com [127.0.0.1]) by iguana.skymind.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA12606; Fri, 17 Nov 2000 15:56:15 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from ocrow@skymind.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 15:56:15 -0800 (PST) From: Oliver Crow To: sebster@sebster.com Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: argument list too long In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Sebastiaan van Erk wrote: > 2) That - is the name most programs use for standard in is well known > to me. Furthermore, this is a convention which has to be respected by > programs themselves and should be documented in the man page if it is > used. For example, from the man page of ipf: > > DESCRIPTION > ipf opens the filenames listed (treating "-" as stdin) and > parses the file for a set of rules which are to be added > > This gives some ambiguity as to how to open the file -. A better > solution in my opinion would be to have some reserved system file name > for stdin/stdout which can always be opened with open(2), so this > functionality can be moved away from programs into the standard > libraries. There is such a file -- /dev/stdin You can do: find . | grep jsp$ | tar -czvf jsp.tgz -T /dev/stdin without relying on the "-" parsing ability of tar. Oliver To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message