On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 05:08:47PM +1200, Juha Saarinen wrote:
> Well, it's silly to do that unthinkingly. Here's what happens on a Debian
> box:
>
> juha@cyrus:~$ tail /
> tail: /: Is a directory
>
> More desirable behaviour, IMO.
FYI, and maybe surprisingly, you're about to start a flame war. BSD
tail and related tools have been treating directories as files for
*many* years. The behavior goes back to the earliest UNIX systems.
It will not change, nor is it worth arguing about.
If you hate the behavior, put a 2-line shell script around tail, cat,
and whatever other programs you want that aborts the operation if the
argument's a directory.
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