The "loop and a half"

[Michael Torrie]

On 10/05/2017 10:38 PM, Dan Sommers wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Oct 2017 19:14:33 -0600, Michael Torrie wrote:
> 
>> It all depends on what the command's purpose is for, and how it's
>> designed to be chained with other commands (cat for example).
> 
> They're almost all designed to be chained with other commands.  Even
> diff and ed are designed to work together in a pipe; the output from
> "diff -e" can be piped into ed to make ed apply changes to a file.

Right. And my point was several of them are smart about detecting
whether they are actually connected to a pipe or to a real tty. And they
change their mode to be more interactive when not on a pipe. For example:

/usr/bin/python3
/usr/bin/bc
/bin/less (reverts to acting like cat when outputting to pipe)

I'm sure there are others. So Bart's complaint does have merit. If a
developer wanted to make a command operate both interactively and not so
in a more verbose manner, he could.