[wplug] ls puzzle

[James O'Kane]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Brandon Kuczenski wrote:
> Thanks -- that's right.. now, I just discovered that I guess I don't use
> '-' correctly.  The directory where I ran that command now has a file
> named '-' but I thought that a 'filename' called '-' was just a secret
> code telling bash to use a little magical temporary file of some kind.
> Was I mistaken?  I guess the only place I've seen '-' used is with tar -f,
> usually in conjunction with ssh.\

It took me a while to understand what you were trying to do and what had
confused you. '-' is often used to tell a program to use STDOUT instead of
a file for output. As far as I know, it's application specific and it
sounds like bash doesn't impliment it.

When you use tar -f -, it's tar that's doing the magic and not bash.

-james