> Communicating with a person is an endless process of content negotiation. What are you and I talking about? Right. So how does grep know it's talking to ls a

> Communicating with a person is an endless process of content negotiation. What are you and I talking about? Right. So how does grep know it's talking to ls about dir contents with a (disk) size field and not talking to ps about process table contents with a (mem) size field? Some sort of slower content negotiation, I presume. > cannot possibly I suggest that every time you think that, you double-check your assumptions. In this case, I think you're just pushing all the extra hard work off onto some other part of the algorithm.