On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Rahul Sundaram <[email protected]> wrote:
> Well, in the past few years, you don't really have to specify x or j or > anything like that. Tar automatically detects whether you are extracting > a gzip, bzip2 or xz compressed archive and call the appropriate tool > automatically. All you have to do is > > tar xvf foo.<tar.gz/tar.bz2/tar.lzma/xz> Oh well. I did not know that :) But I feel that this is not a feature. It is more like featuritis. Shouldn't each tool be independant of another. I might use my own gunzip implementation. :( This is one of those "moments" when I feel that GNU/Linux is trying too hard to do the Windows idea of "One tool does it all" compared to the more elegant "One tool does one thing and does it well" philosophy of UNIX. The original cat just concatenated files. Printing one file to stdout was something more like an exception handler. Now, cat prints $ at the end of lines with the -e. Worse still. -e == -vE. -s squeezes out empty lines -t and -T are related to viewing tabs. -u is ignored. -v shows non printing characters. -A == -vET -b numbers non-blank lines and -n numbers all lines. None of these seem to have anything to do with concatenation. Most of this work must be done by awk(line numbering, removing blank lines etc). --- Ashok `ScriptDevil` Gautham _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
