From: SonOfLilit <sonoflilit@...>
Date: 2007-07-03T02:42:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Feature Request: Special file '-' denoting stdin/stdout

This creates some awful situations, like having a file called '-' and
doing ./script * . I'm against it - it's a hack.


Aur Saraf

On 7/2/07, Ronald Fischer <ronald.fischer@venyon.com> wrote:
>
> > It should be mentioned that both File.new and File.open are
> > able to receive file descriptors:
>
> This does not help much, because still I would then need to decide
> at runtime, whether (for example) the number 1 passed via the command
> line of my program, denotes the file descriptor 1 (stdout) or a file
> name "1".
>
> > If you insist on using "-", you might want to have a look on
> > either of the implementations below.
>
> Both implementations are fine, but I never doubted that we can
> implement this explicitly per application. My point was that this
> usage of the "-" has become so common - perhaps because it is
> heavily used in the Gnu world and is built into Perl as well. As
> an example for how it works with the Gnu tools, I present a sketch
> of a bash script:
>
>   #!/usr/bin/bash
>   # This is file exa1.sh
>   ...
>   fgrep "$1" /var/mail/log $HOME/mailbox $2
>   ...
>
> I have several ways to call it, for example
>
>   exa1.sh foo  # search in /var/mail/log and mailbox
>   exa1.sh bar mailbox.old  # search also in mailbox.old
>   genmail | exa1.sh baz - # also search in the stdout of genmail
>
> Similar in Perl: If you write
>
>   open(RCFILE,$ARGV[3])  # This is Perl
>
> the user can supply on the command line a dash, and the program
> would automatically read stdin for RCFILE.
>
> Since this is such a common usage of the '-', I suggest that
> it should be incorporated into Ruby in a similar way as in Perl.
>
> Ronald
> --
> Ronald Fischer <ronald.fischer@venyon.com>
> Phone: +49-89-452133-162
>
>
>