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nm and objdump when no symbols
- From: John Reiser <jreiser at BitWagon dot com>
- To: binutils at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 10:18:01 -0700
- Subject: nm and objdump when no symbols
- Organization: -
> > > I think that error messages should be sent to stderr and not stdout.
> >
> > Agreed. This message isn't an error.
>
> Welllll maybe. ...
Especially for 'nm',
I'm in favor of "no special treatment for an empty set". If you ask
for symbols but there are no symbols, then you should get an empty
output on stdout. This greatly helps when constructing pipelines
to perform other tasks, and 'nm' is the source for many pipelines.
Kibitzing ("There are no symbols.") belongs on stderr, and malformed
input should return a non-zero exit status. [A properly-described
empty set is not malformed.]
--
John Reiser, jreiser@BitWagon.com