UI

[Juergen A. Erhard]

>>>>> "Caskey" == Caskey L Dickson <caskey at technocage.com> writes:

    Caskey> On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Kirk Fort wrote:
    >> > The problem with the current behavior is that it is neither documented
    >> > nor obvious.  *What* does this filter do?
    >> 
    >> The filter decrypts files, I believe.  To you can put 'gpg < cryptfile'
    >> and it will decrypt for you.  IMO, I think this is good unix behavior.

    Caskey> If you don't mind, I'd like to recommend that when discovering new
    Caskey> programs the first thing you do ought not be `$ command`; rather it
    Caskey> should be `$ man command`.  Life is far easier that way and someone did go
    Caskey> to all the hard work of making that page for you to read.

Thanks for your patronizing words... not!

Carefully reading the manpage (the SYNOPSIS anyway) reveals that

  gpg

is impossible.

But it ain't.  Typing away merrily after saying `gpg', can result in
this:

  gpg: no valid RFC1991 or OpenPGP data found.

or this

  gpg: [don't know]: invalid packet (ctb=64)

(which followed directly after `ddddddddddddd', 13 `d's I typed).

Very intuitive.  Very helpful.

Let me compare this to gzip again.  If you say `gzip', it assumes you
want to compress, but it does not do so, because stdout is bound to a
tty.  Add a --force to the gzip call, and it compresses.  Which
produces garbage on the terminal.

Anyway,

Bye, J

-- 
Jürgen A. Erhard  eMail: jae at laden.ilk.de  phone: (GERMANY) 0721 27326
   MARS: http://members.tripod.com/~Juergen_Erhard/mars_index.html
	  "Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book;
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