[Bulk] Re: The name "grep"

[Warren Block]

On Mon, 7 Jul 2014, Arthur Chance wrote:

> On 07/07/2014 17:28, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> 
>>> On Mon, 07 Jul 2014 14:21:04 +0100, Arthur Chance wrote:
>>>> 	dd [options] [ infile [ outfile ]]
>> 
>> This way users by accident could mistake the infile with the outfile.
>> 
>> We dislike to randomly screw up infile and outfile, so IMO it makes
>> sense to force if= and of= "operands".
>
> There's no problem about which file is input and which output with cp or mv, 
> so why on earth would it be a problem with a sane version of dd?
>
> If you really need a hand holding indication of which file is which,
>
> 	dd -i $infile -o $outfile
>
> would be in the Unix spirit, unlike the existing form. And with an 
> interactive shell you could use filename completion which fails with the 
> existing dd.

There's an ongoing thread in the forums about csh completions.  dd is 
one of them:

complete dd 'c/if=/f/' 'c/of=/f/' \
             'c/conv=*,/(ascii block ebcdic lcase pareven noerror notrunc osync sparse swab sync unblock)/,' \
             'c/conv=/(ascii block ebcdic lcase pareven noerror notrunc osync sparse swab sync unblock)/,' \
             'p/*/(bs cbs count files fillcahr ibs if iseek obs of oseek seek skip conv)/='

There is no reason a wrapper script could not be written for dd.  It's 
probably about twenty years too late to popularize a different format, 
though.