1.5 Standard options
There are several options that are used in many commands that have a
consistent meaning.
Quiet- Suppress all unnecessary output, such as intermediate
results, disk reads, activity indicators.
- Echo
- Echo all disk reads to the console, as read from the disk.
- Basic
- Format the output for compatibility with other software
with primitive input parsers, such as C's scanf and Basic's input statements. It forces exponential notation, instead of our
standard abbreviated notation. Any numbers that would ordinarily be
printed without an exponent are not changed. It is the default when
the output of a command is directed to a file.
- Pack
- Remove extra spaces from the output to save space at the
expense of readability.
- <
- Take the input from a file. The file name follows in the
same line.
- >
- Direct the output to a file. The file name follows. If the
file already exists, it will ask permission to delete the old one and
replace it with a new one with the same name.
- >>
- Direct the output to a file. If the file already exists,
the new data is appended to it.
- |
- Pipe the output to a program.