On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 04:45:25PM +0000, Frank Hofmann wrote: > >You've lost me. It's always the case that the behaviour on the right side > >of a > >pipe is dependent on what happens on the left side of a pipe. I can't > >imagine > >any concept of a pipe where that isn't true. > > If the command on the right side of the pipe is supposed to operate on the > last word of the input string, I just don't expect it to work on the first > simply because the sequence of words was added to in some way.
I think you're labouring under a fundamental misunderstanding of how MDB pipes work. There is no "last word" or "first word" in this context. The change in -a behaviour just changes what the single value passed through the pipe is. > I do consider it a bug that I can't take an arbitrary string ending with a > hex number separated by whitespace from whatever's before, pipe that into > mdb's ::print and get an output. And changing the behaviour in the way it > was done doesn't really make it more consistent. Well, that's a completely different question. There might be an argument for supporting this, I suppose. > >The fact that the -a option to ::print was previously useless in a pipe > >context > >is edging pretty close to a bug as far as I can see. > > The fact that it didn't cause a difference in pipe behaviour was a > feature. Could you explain how this was a feature? In particular what possible use it was to be able to specify a useless option. regards john
