Regedit output to STDOUT / force registry files sync

[Bill Medland]

On Tue, 2007-20-03 at 21:12 +0100, Vit Hrachovy wrote:
> Bill Medland wrote:
> 
> >> b) Enhance regedit to be able to output to STDOUT. By default registry 
> >> search output is done to a specified file. It can be redirected to 
> >> STDERR, though. (tested on 0.9.29, 0.9.33)
> >>
> > c) Use the shell
> > wine regedit -e /tmp/$$.reg <branch> && cat /tmp/$$.reg && rm -f /tmp/$
> > $.reg
> 
> Hi Bill,
> that's not the case I'm searching for. I'm aware that regedit can export 
>   into files. I simply want registry export to STDOUT nothing else.
> 

in which case I did not get my point across.  I understand that you are
aware that you can export to a file; that was clear.

My point is that the great thing (to me) about unix-like systems is the
ability to join commands together, which it is why I can write a simple
statement that will use the existing regedit and two standard unix
programs (cat and rm) to generate the output on stdout.

> As Lei Zhang mentioned such an application would be useful for more 
> people than me, I'm going to submit a patch with some sort of new 
> application [not to break 1 to 1 regedit compatibility] able to output 
> registry entries to STDOUT.
> 

You seem to accept the point that we should not add functionality to the
existing regedit, so that we retain 1-1 compatibility with the Windows
version.

However in creating yet another application I suggest you are
reinventing the wheel.  Either it will use regedit to do the hard work
(in which case it is equivalent to what I suggested) or else it will
access the registry itself (in which case it is going to have a lot in
common with regedit and so you are duplicating functionality and
accepting the maintenance cost).

(Can I also suggest that going back to your original idea we could
accept a filename of - as meaning stdin/stdout, so that we can use

regedit -e - "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE....."

Then we still have the same arguments as Windows; it's just that we are
a little more free in what we accept as a filename.  After all, we
already accept Unix filenames as well as Windows filenames.)

> Regards
> Vit
> 
>