Re: "touch -" touching standard output

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden (Bob Proulx) writes:

> Making special cases such as "-" mean stdin or stdout always seemed
> like an ugly hack to me.  It makes it more difficult to actually refer
> to real files named "-".

True, though that horse left the barn around 1975 and hasn't been seen since.

Here's a fun example.  The following shell command works even with
older coreutils (e.g., Debian stable), and it updates /var/tmp's time
stamp on my host:

  touch /dev/stdout 1< /var/tmp

It's not clear what effect this command will have on various other
hosts, though.

The idea of --fd=0 --fd=1 would also work, but would be harder to
parse and explain -- e.g., people might want to interleave those
options with file names, which runs into getopt and documentation
issues.