Sevan Janiyan wrote: > > > On 19/07/2015 15:35, Bob Beck wrote: > > The place to solve this is in whatever is using cat for this purpose. > > check for the file type before blindly cat'ing. > > Understood both your & Ted's explanation regarding cat. > Just so it's crisp clear, ignoring cat(1), having such a flag in > fopen(2) is not of interest for use elsewhere either?
I could maybe be convinced. However, fopen is the C standard stdio function. One reason you may be using stdio is because you want portability, so adding nonportable extensions to it seems counter productive. If you need to know about all sorts of fifos vs sockets vs files, there are a variety of posix APIs for that, portable to all posix systems.
