In bash, the empty command can be redirected to a file:
% >out
It will create or overwrite 'out' as the empty file. That may be useful.
But somehow you can also say
% whoami | >out
This again writes empty content. I suggest this odd feature is not useful and
indeed gets in the way,
since whe
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 11:40 AM, Ed Avis wrote:
> In bash, the empty command can be redirected to a file:
>
> % >out
>
> It will create or overwrite 'out' as the empty file. That may be useful.
> But somehow you can also say
>
> % whoami | >out
This isn't surprising or deserving of a special ca
The reason I found 'whoami | >out' to be surprising is that none of the
following work:
% | >out
% (whoami |)
% whoami | | cat
If | > is a valid construct, what are its semantics?
--
Ed Avis
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Ed Avis writes:
> If | > is a valid construct, what are its semantics?
$ whoami | >out tr 'a 'b'
Andreas.
--
Andreas Schwab, SUSE Labs, sch...@suse.de
GPG Key fingerprint = 0196 BAD8 1CE9 1970 F4BE 1748 E4D4 88E3 0EEA B9D7
"And now for something completely different."
Thanks. So 'whoami | >out' working is a natural consequence of the fact that
'>out' is a command by itself.
IMHO it would have been better for the Unix shell to forbid that, and require
': >out' if you really do want to run the null command and redirect its output,
but it's too late now.
--
E
Ed Avis wrote:
> Thanks. So 'whoami | >out' working is a natural consequence of the
> fact that '>out' is a command by itself.
It is a natural consequence of parsing redirections before parsing
commands. The redirection happens before the command execution and an
empty command is valid. That re
