Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How does man know?
Summary: Hogwash
Keywords: more, io redirection
Message-ID: <592@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 28 Sep 89 13:42:20 GMT
References: <319@massey.ac.nz> <11170@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center
Lines: 23

In article <11170@smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:

|  You're right, of course.
|  Somebody thought it would be "convenient" for the command to alter
|  its behavior based on what the implementor thought the usage would be.
|  Thereby demonstrating once again that Earth people are stupid, stupid,
|  stupid.

  And guess what? It *is* convenient to have it work that way. If I
need a copy of the man page in a file I can say "man foo >file" and not
have to guess when it's waiting for me to hit return. If I want to use
my own pager for some reason I can "man foo | mypage" and it works.

  Without this man would not work right in shell scripts or any of the
above convenient uses. The object of writing a command for any o/s is to
make it useful, and if that's stupid I hope a few more stupid people get
working on UNIX.

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon