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Ovid (2709)

Ovid
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http://publius-ovidius.livejournal.com/
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Stuff with the Perl Foundation. A couple of patches in the Perl core. A few CPAN modules. That about sums it up.

Journal of Ovid (2709)

Wednesday August 01, 2007

04:33 AM

'cat' eq 'ls'

[ #33944 ]

I'm so sick and tired of typing "cat $some_dir" or "ls $some_file" that I'm thinking of writing bash functions that will switch the two around, as needed. The cat $some_dir is particularly bad as it really screws up my terminal settings by spewing junk across the screen.

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You want "less" (Score:1)

by markjugg (792)

On Linux, "less" can handle both:
less dir/

less file.txt

However, on the FreeBSD machines I use, "less" can't handle directories, so I don't depend on it for that.
- Re: (Score:1)
  
  by chibiryuu (8051)
  
  less dir/ only works for me when $ENV{LESSOPEN} is set to an appropriate script, regardless of Linux or BSD.
Wha? (Score:1)

by Aristotle (5147)

cat spews junk? All I get is

$ cat . cat: .: Is a directory

Btw, blindly typing reset + Enter on a screwed terminal will often fix it.
- Re: (Score:2)
  
  by Ovid (2709)
  
  The reset command breaks my backspace key, though. I could probably source my .bashrc as I think I have something in there to fix it, but I can't recall.
- Re: (Score:1)
  
  by chibiryuu (8051)
  
  Linux typically generates errno=EISDIR on open(".", O_WRONLY) and read(dirfd, …). IIRC, the latter varies by filesystem on BSD.
mmm (Score:2)

by jhi (318)

I don't know about swapping but my (z)shell alias 'm' handles directories (ls -sF | less) and files (less), and for certain types of files it does Magic (TM), e.g. for .tar.bz2 it pipes bzip2 -d foo.tar.bz2 | tar tvf - to less (I don't do tar jtvf because I don't have gtar everywhere). Kinda like open(1) in Mac OS X.