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Re: "touch -" touching standard output
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: "touch -" touching standard output |
Date: |
Mon, 26 Sep 2005 23:36:19 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) |
address@hidden (Bob Proulx) writes:
> Making special cases such as "-" mean stdin or stdout always seemed
> like an ugly hack to me. It makes it more difficult to actually refer
> to real files named "-".
True, though that horse left the barn around 1975 and hasn't been seen since.
Here's a fun example. The following shell command works even with
older coreutils (e.g., Debian stable), and it updates /var/tmp's time
stamp on my host:
touch /dev/stdout 1< /var/tmp
It's not clear what effect this command will have on various other
hosts, though.
The idea of --fd=0 --fd=1 would also work, but would be harder to
parse and explain -- e.g., people might want to interleave those
options with file names, which runs into getopt and documentation
issues.