Re: Question Re: Piping and Redirection

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Tom Liotta wrote:

> elsewhere. Disregarding any fancy facilities some great shell might have
> beyond just piping and redirection, on other systems, how do basic
> commands/utilities such as sed and grep handle files that aren't
> streamfiles?

Do you mean how are record based files handled on other systems or do you
mean how are record based files handled by the shell commands on the
iSeries?  I think you mean the second.

I think a lot of what happens has to do with the underlying file system
structure.  Since you ask about files specifically and not stdin/stdout
the issue revolves around what the open() and read() functions do.  You
could write a little program to test these out yourself.  An easier test
is to try from the QSHELL command prompt:

cat /QSYS.LIB/MY.LIB/MYFILE.FILE/MEMBER.MBR

and see what you get.  I don't have a machine to test with right now so
please post your results, I'd like to know what you get.

> That is, traditional OS/400 commands commonly wouldn't support something
> like piping because they generally rely on a database record format. Is
> it even meaningful to make comparisons outside of QSHELL?

The discussion revolved around which command interface was more user
friendly, not so much about which did its particular job better.  Because
users have different needs and everyone does things differently some very
meaningful discussion occurred.

James Rich