tr problem

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Fri Jun 13 00:17:30 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 18:53 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Rick Stevens wrote:
> > 
> >>>>
> >>>> The manpage (and pinfo tr too) is, shall we say, completely lacking 
> >>>> in how to handle the file I/O.
> >>>>
> >>> Plus, you probably have a program called dos2unix installed...
> >>
> >> Oops, I should have read past the word 'legacy' which must not have 
> >> meant what I thought.
> >> tr '\r' '\n'
> >> should work.
> > 
> > More like:
> > 
> >     cat input-filename | tr '\r' '\n' >output-filename
> > 
> > Not so?  tr is a filter.
> 
> It reads stdin and writes stdout, like most unix command line programs. 
>       The shell will connect those to whatever you want with |'s or 
> <>'s.  Using cat with a pipe is a waste of a process, though.  tr can 
> read it's own input just as well with <input-filename.

Quite true, but I remember a remark in one of the classic Unix papers to
the effect that people somehow found the 'cat foo | ' syntax more
natural.

poc




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