On Fri, 26 May 2000, Tom Rauschenbach wrote:
> WOW! I've always assumed that the shell did all the plumbing up front (thereby
> clobbering the input to the second part of the "list", in this case named junk).
>
> I've warned MANY people against clobbering their input by using the same file
> as ouput. The sort(1) man page even goes out of its way to mention that the -o
> option won't clobber an input file if it is alsp the output.
>
> I think I won't depend having a modern shell anytime soon.
The -o option of the sort command is designed to get around the
stdout redirection in a case such as:
sort file > file
which WILL NOT WORK, even under modern shells. In this case, you will
definitely wipe out your input file. But if you do
cat file | sort > file
This will work just fine. It's just not necessary and adds overhead. On
the other hand, with modern hardware the overhead is probably not worth
mentioning unless you've got a REALLY busy machine.
--
Derek Martin
System Administrator
Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
