Hacker News Reader

I’m seeing this for the first time and don’t quite get the usefulness of this interface, can you help me? I mean, file descriptor numbers instead of ordinary options provide some i/o semantics, but I have to remember the descriptor numbers? Is there some mnemonic/logic behind the ids?

View on HN

Fair question. Im not the author so can only make a guess (other readers of HN surely know far more than I about these subjects). However I suspect the rationale is related to whats been called "Bernstein chaining".

https://cr.yp.to/proto/ucspi.txt

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s06.html

https://skarnet.org/software/execline/grammar.html

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/13.html

Hmmm, now I don’t get how Bernstein chaining relates to file descriptor interface. I’m curious about specifically the `4<infile` you seem to be admiring, you just observed its unusualness or do you see how its more powerful than the more common `-input infile`?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com