jbc@mcc-db.UUCP (John B. Chambers) (07/15/85)
From: John Chambers (guest moderator) <ut-sally!std-unix> Topic: command line arguments continued ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: ihnp4!tektronix!uucp@ut-sally.ARPA Date: Saturday, 13 Jul 85 18:43:47 PDT Subject: What to do about extraneous arguments? Another aspect of command arguments is: after all the necessary arguments have been processed, what if some are left? Some commands process the whole list, and are intended to do so (e.g. ls(1)). Others (e.g. diff(1), cmp(1)) only work on a specific number of arguments. Common practice seems to be to ignore extraneous arguments. A user here has requested that cmp(1) be modified to generate a diagnostic if more than 2 filenames are provided. This might be helpful when using wildcards for filenames, as in: cmp foo* fum* If there is more than one file matching 'foo*' and you don't realize it, the results are not what you expect. Comments? tektronix!rdoty ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- John B. Chambers, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp., Austin, TX {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!mcc-db!jbc, jbc@ut-sally.ARPA, chambers@mcc.ARPA