On 11/13/2018 5:49 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: The very definition of simplicity and elegance. I pine for those days. Or at least, what I used to do in MACRO-10 in high school ;)

I was offended by the -u flag in v7 cat, which was a necessary but unfortunate consequence of preserving the original's semantics while converting it to use the new standard I/O library. Dennis felt it was important as a proof of the value of stdio; to me it was an indication that stdio couldn't do everything. I rewrote cat to use just read and write, as nature intended. I don't recall if my version is in any of v8 v9 v10 but it, or something very like it, is in Plan 9: % cat cat.c #include <u.h> #include <libc.h> void cat(int f, char *s) { char buf[8192]; long n; while((n=read(f, buf, (long)sizeof buf))>0) if(write(1, buf, n)!=n) sysfatal("write error copying %s: %r", s); if(n < 0) sysfatal("error reading %s: %r", s); } void main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int f, i; argv0 = "cat"; if(argc == 1) cat(0, "<stdin>"); else for(i=1; i<argc; i++){ f = open(argv[i], OREAD); if(f < 0) sysfatal("can't open %s: %r", argv[i]); else{ cat(f, argv[i]); close(f); } } exits(0); } % -rob P.S. I learned today that cat.c has a spurious trailing newline. On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 10:15 AM Dave Horsfall &lt;dave(a)horsfall.org&gt; wrote: