On Sun, March 23, 2008 2:47 pm, SJS wrote: > begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:12:58AM -0700: >> > [chop] >> <grumble> but whatever happened to the *nix tradition of "return >> silently >> on success"? > > Too small a demographic appreciates that simplicity. > > Everyone else is used to computer systems that silently freeze up and > hang. Chatty status messages give a warm fuzzy that the system hasn't > crashed yet. > > For your purposes, I'm thinking about it... what if we had a wrapper > program? > > sense [ -<pattern> <filename> [ -<pattern> <filename> ]* ] <program> > <args> > > e.g., > > % sense -^Error: error.log -^Warning: warn.fifo lan_program foo bar baz >
Thanks for thinking of me. The program in question (I may have mentioned this) is cdparanoia, which is a great CLI utility but which has smiley faces fer crissakes as an output message. The tclsh exec command does not shell out which is often a good thing and is always interesting. (I assume it forks w/in the same process level. What it does in Windoze god alone knows and for all of me, god alone cares.) One can manage this by catching the output and throwing it away; or one can save it for analysis, which is a big fat PITA, because why am I scripting error catching for programs that already have error reporting? But as a middle way, one can build a command: set cmd "cdparanoia -B 1-" ... and then exec a shell (in a window if a GUI app) to run it. And this allows the human to oogle the output and smile back at the smiley faces or panic with the panics. And this is what I'll do. But it still begs the question of why a human has to sit there and watch a script run. -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
