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.