Why use U* over VMS

[larry hughes]

In article <1380 at tharr.UUCP> sweh at tharr.UUCP (Stephen Harris) writes:
>How in VMS do you have filters and pipelines?
>eg, what would be the VMS (DCL?) equivalent of
>	getso - | tbl | pic | eqn | rof | col | sqps | lpr -Ppost < file
>
>Is there an equivalent, or would it need a lot of temporary files?

Yes, you would need a lot of temporary files.  The output of each
step would have to redirected to a file (ala $ DEFINE/USER SYS$OUTPUT
filename) and then the temp file would have to be redirected as input
to the next step (ala $ DEFINE/USER SYS$INPUT filename).  And, don't
forget to delete the temp files!

(Yes, this is slightly worse that the way that MS-DOS does it...at least
DOS makes the temp file usage transparent.)

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