How does man know?

[Wm E Davidsen Jr]

In article <11170 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:

|  You're right, of course.
|  Somebody thought it would be "convenient" for the command to alter
|  its behavior based on what the implementor thought the usage would be.
|  Thereby demonstrating once again that Earth people are stupid, stupid,
|  stupid.

  And guess what? It *is* convenient to have it work that way. If I
need a copy of the man page in a file I can say "man foo >file" and not
have to guess when it's waiting for me to hit return. If I want to use
my own pager for some reason I can "man foo | mypage" and it works.

  Without this man would not work right in shell scripts or any of the
above convenient uses. The object of writing a command for any o/s is to
make it useful, and if that's stupid I hope a few more stupid people get
working on UNIX.

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen at crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon