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in reply to (OT) Re^3: The basics
in thread The basics

I'm trying to figure out where you get the idea that the contents are passed to tail's stdin. It's not. The full path to the file (as given by the shell - full path if searched via PATH, relative path if PATH not used) is passed in.

Compare the output of "strace ./a" and "strace /usr/bin/tail -n2 < a". The former has a call to "open" and all reading is done from filehandle 3. The latter doesn't call open, and all reading is done from filehandle 0.

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Re^5: The basics
by Hue-Bond (Priest) on Jun 25, 2006 at 14:35 UTC
    I'm trying to figure out where you get the idea that the contents are passed to tail's stdin.

    I guess I'll also have to. To my surprise, you're right.

    --
    David Serrano