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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards
From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:12:08 +0100
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Date: 2007-03-07T22:08:54+01:00
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On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 11:21 -0800, Hyman Rosen wrote:

> One of those other consequences is that many, if not most, UNIX
> programs treat a no-argument command as meaning "do your default
> action".

Yes, it is this default meaning that I had thought about when
suggesting that a possible alternative in designing Unix command
line conventions would have been not to do implicit, default,
things. In this case, when I wanted to cat standard input into
a file, I just say what I want:

$ cat /dev/stdin > my.text   # or use - in place of /dev/stdin
It works!
^D
$

(Requesting the standard input as /dev/stdin, maybe -, but not '',
actually fits nicely with the way Unix uses the filing
system. And similarly for Plan 9. :)