The Visible Cat

[Robert Viduya]

><
Posted from  cottrell at nbs-vms.ARPA
> My SYS V (Motorola port, V.0) has no cat -v. It has no pg either. TPC
> dragged their feet on any kind of screen editor and still does not
> have csh or the multicolumn ls that DMR railed against. It was 
> instructive to read his thoughts on multicolumn filters and in fact I
> wrote /bin/lm that contains the line `ls $* | pr -at5'. While I can
> see that features for features sake is cancerous, lack of funxionality
> is annoying, user hostile, and just plain boring. Joe Random Hacker
> (he's back, folx!) wants to see his files in a pretty-printed format,
> he doesn't care that the ouput can be piped to grep or sed in a
> one-file-per line format. Tools should serve their masters.

Actually, System V R2 pulled a bit of "one-up-manship" on Berkeley.  The
SysVr2 ls has two extra options ('-C' and '-x') which columnate filenames
in either row-major or column-major format.  However, they still didn't
bother to check if standard output was a terminal, requiring you to
specify the option explicitly.  I kinda got away with it by using:

    ls()
    {
	if [ -t ]
	    /bin/ls -C $*
	else
	    /bin/ls $*
	fi
    }

					robert

-- 
Robert Viduya
Georgia Institute of Technology

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