Hi. I haven't been using commandline extensively for some years, and when I come back to Linux, I was surprised to see GUI software being developed so fast and so well on Linux (and feel happy about it). However I wonder if current commandlin isn't as useful as was. e.g. in order to play midi music keyboard I instantly think of doing this: $ timidity < /dev/midi timidity is the player that generate sounds from midi events. /dev/midi is the device that produce such events, like /dev/ttyS0 when connected to a mouse. And I was told no, that's not the way it is. correct way is: $ timidity -AD # put to daemon mode $ aconnect 16:0 128:0 # 16:0 is another way to represent /dev/midi # while 128:0 is the virtual device that generates sound Another example: when I wanted to join multiple TIFF images into a single multi-page tiff image, I thought I could do this: $ tiffcat < page-1.tiff page-2.tiff page-3.tiff page-4.tiff > pages.tiff And I was told no. The right way to do it is: $ tiffcp page-1.tiff page-2.tiff page-3.tiff page-4.tiff pages.tiff The problem of tiffcp is I have to use the temporary files, otherwise I could pipe the output of the command that generated these page-?.tiff, like this: $ (cmd1; cmd2; cmd3) | tiffcp > pages.tiff I was wondering if pipe is now being used less as it was used to be or should be, and is this something good or bad? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org