Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: combine script (was Re: More silence in comp.binaries.ibm.pc)
Message-ID: <10007@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
Date: 10 Aug 89 14:49:23 GMT
References: <24170@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <1540001@hpdml93.HP.COM>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 22

In article <1540001@hpdml93.HP.COM> campbell@hpdml93.HP.COM (Gary Campbell)
writes:
>BTW: Why the cat in
>
>  cat $* | sed '/^END/,/^BEGIN/d'| uudecode
>
>My man page shows that sed will take a series of files like cat...

Since cat is a small, simple, and universal utility, its behavior is
fairly predictable on all **IX family operating systems including those
not derived from UNIX itself.  But who knows what sed does on all
systems?  And what does sed do with a file called "-e"?  (Although some
cats will choke on some filenames beginning with a dash, this is a
little less likely than with sed.)

Portability was the main reason for letting cat combine multiple files,
and asking sed to do only the simplest thing possible, i.e., read from
stdin and write to stdout.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi 
UUCP:    ...!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi
(Will change to cirrusl!dhesi effective approximately August 28)