Re: cat - -

[James Youngman]

On Jan 16, 2008 12:01 AM,  <address@hidden> wrote:
> Yes yes. I'm just saying supposing a theoretical new user's first
> encounter with all this stuff was the document trail that started with
> the cat man page, then he would think "-" was broken.

The best place to document this could well be a new-user document.
Explaining that once you've read all the data from a pipe, you can't
rewind it, and explaining that in one place is probably more helpful
than stating it as a caveat on the handling of "-" in hundreds of
utilities.  Such a document would also be a good place to explain the
handling of wildcards and so forth too.  But the main problem is to
figure out where to put such a document so that new users will
actually read it.   What do you think?

> So still an understanding of Unix is implied as the docs perhaps
> describe 95% but not yet 100% of what one needs to know.

I think exposition of general principles probably belongs somewhere else.

James.