On 2017-10-07, Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > sort *could* detect when it is reading from stdin interactively and give an > introductory message.
There are some command-line utilities that try to do that: they modify their behavior when they think that stdin or stdout is connected to a "terminal" instead of a pipe. Personally, I find that annoying and inconvenient. I hate it when I run a program, look at the output and decide I want to do some processing on it, so I hit 'ctrl-P' and pipe the output to sed, grep, awk, sort, whatever. And it doesn't work. After wasting _way_ too much time trying to figure out what I did wrong in my sed/grep/awk/whatever command, I finally realize that the @#$!% program changes its output format when stdout is a pipe, and the rest of the pipeline was designed to process the stdout-is-a-terminal output format. And don't get me started on command-line utilities that use colored output that's only usable if yor terminal is configured with a black background. Hint to gentoo portage authors: yellow-on-white text is _not_ readable. -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
