[H-GEN] ASCII Characters

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Trent WADDINGTON <s337240 at student.uq.edu.au> writes:

> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, James McPherson - PTS Engineer wrote:
>> Sure, but you missed the point. Tao was referring to a previous
>> post which had
>> cat file | strings
> Which is the correct way.

>> rather than just
>> strings file
> Which is an unnecessary feature of strings.

stdin can't be rewound; at least in theory strings could keep an eye
on what sort of characters are coming in on stdin and go back and give
the input a second pass based on that.  

There isn't any space-efficient way to do so if strings can't accept
filenames on the command line.

Similarly it's hard to apply the same options to a large list of files
without invoking strings over and over if stdin and stdout are the
only channels available to you.

Sometimes the nature of the filter makes it reasonable to do things
differently, or at least to disagree with Thompson.
-- 
Baby Pictures:
      http://panix.com/~jasonp?HenryGrosvenorParkerBurlingham

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