[Cryptography] Simpler programs?

Bill Stewart billstewart at pobox.com
Fri Apr 18 18:39:21 EDT 2014


>Sandy Harris <sandyinchina at gmail.com> writes:
> > For example, I once saw a  T-shirt at a Usenix conference that read
> > "Real cats don't have options" and checking the Plan 9 man page 
> for cat(1) I find
> > that theirs has none. The FSF version on my Linux box, on the 
> other hand, has 11.

Obviously anybody who thinks that real cats don't have options has 
never owned a cat.
"man cat" may not list them, but that's because you're asking a man 
about cats,
not asking a cat, not that the cat is necessarily inclined to tell 
you its options.
"cat -h" or "cat --help" doesn't work, because your cat isn't going 
to help you.
"cat --help food" might work, but your idea of help and your cat's 
idea may be different.

More seriously, though, "cat -u" is sometimes important,
because sometimes you really do need unbuffered output,
especially if the file or files are devices or other special files.





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