root@garbled.net (Tim Rightnour) writes:

>I was fiddling around with something the other night, and did this:

>mkdir bob
>cp blah bob
>cat *>out

>At which point the machine just stood there..  ^C, and the file out was about
>2 megs!

>cat bob>out gives a 512 byte file.. so why when I do the *, does it make such a
>mess??

Well, "cat *>out" really is equivalent to "cat blah bob out > out" in
this case.  And it is copying out onto itself.

>Is this a bug?  should I send-pr it?  Or is this "expected wierd behavior" and
>"dont do that"?

This used to be the expected behaviour, IIRC.  But some versions of cat
complain about the output being an input.

Klaus?
-- 
Christoph Badura

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