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