On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 04:46:50PM -0400, Jeffrey Trimble wrote: > 2. less does really "do" anything. Now, I'm running AIX, so java > flavor can make a different. cat worked perfectly and solved all my > problems. Should this too be a documented feature? What's the > difference as we know them? And why one over the other?
I'd prefer 'cat' because it's the minimal solution: it just pours out a file unaltered. 'less' is a fairly sophisticated text navigation tool and tries to be clever. We don't want clever when inserting file contents into a command string; we want bulletproof. I've become particularly wary of 'less' since I started using Gentoo Linux, where the default setup causes it to pipe stuff through all kinds of formatters if it thinks it recognizes the file type. It's a very nice tool usually but can be surprising at times. Anyway, yes, I think we should recommend 'cat' rather than 'less' for copying a file's content into the middle of a Unix command string through command substitution. I'm happy to hear that 'cat' solved the mystery. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [email protected] Friends don't let friends publish revisable-form documents.
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