*BSD News Article 57525


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From: c2a192@ugrad.cs.ubc.ca (Kazimir Kylheku)
Newsgroups: alt.unix.wizards,comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.advocacy,comp.unix.aix,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Re: A challenge
Date: 21 Dec 1995 07:34:45 -0800
Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
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In article <4b9kvv$ria@hecate.umd.edu>, Ed Schmahl <ed@astro.umd.edu> wrote:
>
>
>Here's a question (possibly useful, possibly stupid) that none of the
>Unix wizards I know have been able to answer.  Let's see if anyone on
>the Net has any suggestions.
>
>Say we've got a (gasp) Fortran program that outputs data to a file called
>R:foobar.  The program compiles fine on VMS and DOS operating systems, but not

There is your problem. Your program should be open-ended enough so that the
user can specify the output file or have the output sent to the standard
output. Even if the output is binary, you should support piping---look at the
programs tar, cpio, dd, xwd...

You can use a command-line option to specify the filename, or an environment
variable. If the program requires a lot of settings, you might want to to give
it the ability to read them from a configuration file.

>on Unix systems, which complains about the ":" as a directory tree separator.
-- 
I got my degree from the U of NIX.
Better dead than Redmond.