Re: wc command

[Andrew McGill]

On Wednesday 17 December 2008 15:07:43 Pádraig Brady wrote:
> chakrapani.chittabathina wrote:
> > Hi,
> >   First, we are grateful to you for your contribution towards this great
> > open source project.
> > Bug : when i am using "wc" command, i've entered only wc without any
> > option and file name even, acidently, then it didn't give any error
> > report, even not giving help info.
>
> wc reads from standard input if no file is specified.
> So it was patiently waiting for you to type something.
Some programs which don't usually receive terminal input print a "warning" 
(based on isatty() ): 
$ gpg
gpg: Go ahead and type your message ...

(Actually, I can't think of other examples.)  While there are perfectly good 
reasons for running wc, grep, sed ... interactively, it's hardly the norm to 
interactively cut and paste a buffer into a basic tool like wc *and* be 
worried about stderr noise.

My guess is that while it would be friendly to provide a similar message for 
wc (od, head, tail, etc), it would violate something posixy (and is therefore 
imposixable).

&:-)