From: Junio C Hamano Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:39:40 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] shortlog: prompt when reading from terminal by mistake Message-ID: <7vwt1q2apf.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> In-Reply-To: Linus Torvalds writes: > Sure, this probably gets some cases (and the one you tried in particular), > but if you pipe the output to a pager, I doubt it's actually all that > useful. > > To simulate a "wait a long time without output" case, try this: > > ( echo "Important warning" >&2 ; sleep 10) | less -S > > and at least for me, I don't see squat _in_case_I'm_at_the_top_ of the > window, simply because "less" will clear the screen for me. > In other words, putting warnings on stderr usually isn't all that useful > when you have something like a pager that will do tty stuff - it will > easily overwrite the warning so quickly that you'll never see it at all. That is correct in general, but you are being unfair. You know git-shortlog has built-in pager _and_ you know _you_ added select(2) before spawning less, so that when that warning is emitted, less hasn't even started running --- it cannot clear the display.