[llvm-dev] [RFC] [tools] Changing Behavior of LLVM binutils When No File Is Specified

[Alex Brachet-Mialot via llvm-dev]

Some binutils, nm comes to mind, when to input file is specified will
default to a.out. Others do not do this and read from stdin by default. The
rest of this email will be specifically referencing these which read from
stdin, and not the tools which for various reasons do things differently.

I propose that we change the behavior of these tools to use a.out when
appropriate. By appropriate I mean firstly, no input file specified and
also no stream redirection to stdin. These are the file types of stdin in
these scenarios:
$ writes-to-stdout | prog # named pipe (fifo)
$ prog < file # regular file
$ prog # reading from tty, character device

Perhaps if stdin is a named pipe or regular file, then the default behavior
should be as it always was, to read from stdin, but if stdin is a tty then
we should use a.out as a default file. This lets these tools act the same
as their gnu counterparts (when meaningful) but also adds what I think is
convenient to not have to specify a.out.

This proposal would look something like this:
$ llvm-strings # not meanigful to read from stdin here, look for a.out
$ llvm-strings < file # use stdin

I may have got the behavior of stream redirection wrong here, or missed a
situation when reading from the terminal is useful. I would love some
feedback.

Best,
Alex
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190625/b6992794/attachment-0001.html>