From: "Kaspar Schiess said:
| I generally strip DOS idiocy on the command line with:
|
| tr -d '\r' < in > out
Why would a thing grown from history be called idiocy in any context ?
It just is that way.
If MS-DOS had come out in the 1950's it might be forgivable.
In 1981 elegant solutions to DOS' stupidities had existed
for at least a decade... And yet DOS debuts with:
- lack of shell globbing (STILL doesn't)
- shell can't escape its own metacharacters (STILL can't)
- ^Z character terminating text files even though this
was a historical artifact from an OS that needed them
because its filesize was measured in blocks... POINTLESS
when your OS knows the exact file size in bytes, which MS-DOS
always has
- ignorance of "a file is a bag of bytes, and everything is
a file" metaphor
- TWO end of line characters for text files when one would do
(in 1981 we had CRT screens not teletypes) <grin>
- special illegal filenames "nul" "com1" "lpt1" etc.
- no piping of program output/input streams (they finally
grafted this on haphazardly)
- can't unlink an open file and continue to read from it
(this is why ruby -i doesn't work for in-place edits in DOS)
It's "idiocy" because better solutions already existed for
a decade... Yes I've been using MS-DOS since 1981...
The history of MS-DOS is the very embodiment and manifestation
of the cute turn of phrase,
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer
..Sadness.
If we change that, we would to have agree on one
line ending for everyone. Doesn't Mac have the same issues but the other
way round ?
At least the old macs just used a single character for
newline, even if it was CR instead of LF...
Regards,
BILLKE~1.TXT
