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Date:      Mon, 30 Apr 2001 19:25:07 +1000
From:      Kal Torak <kaltorak@quake.com.au>
Cc:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: tail
Message-ID:  <3AED2F73.554E766F@quake.com.au>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0104301632200.43352-100000@lists.unixathome.org> <KPECIILENDDLPCNIMLOFOEOICCAA.juha@saarinen.org> <20010429222205.A29058@praxis.lunabase.org> <20010430110352.A646@iv.nn.kiev.ua> <15085.10336.706403.988118@raw.grenland.fast.no>

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Valentin Nechayev writes:
>  Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 22:22:05, faber (Ted Faber) wrote about "Re: tail":
>
> > > juha@cyrus:~$ tail /
> > > tail: /: Is a directory
> > >
> > > More desirable behaviour, IMO.
> >
> > FYI, and maybe surprisingly, you're about to start a flame war.  BSD
> > tail and related tools have been treating directories as files for
> > *many* years.
>
> Can you please prove nesessarity of such behavior, as really useful examples
> of cat/tail of directory, or an example of needed compatibility?
> If no (and I am sure that you has no such examples), you should consider
> badness of writing arbitrary binary data to terminal. E.g., xterm & screen
> terminals can be dropped to unrepairable state in such way.

The reason is because cat and tail are tools to print the EXACT data of a file
to the output device you specifiy... They are NOT tools for reading text files
like M$ work for example which wont open anything that it dosent think you would
really want to look at!

Just because you dicided to cat some binary data to your terminal and it caused
a few problems is not a reason to limit cat from reading anything you tell it to!
Infact its quite possible you might want to take the last 10 lines of a binary file
and put them in another file: # tail bin.file > another.file

There is no such thing as unrepairable state, simply kill the terminal and start a
new one, problem solved! This topic is really stupid and has nothing to do with stable
at all! These tools are the way they are because its good... If you cant use them
then why dont you go code a new tool called ascii-text-only-cat or something like that...

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