There I said it !
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Well in this particular case, zcat failing with error on uncompressed text isn’t a behaviour worth preserving.
It should do the expected zcat behaviour, which is just print the text.
I have a hard time imagining a scenario where you call zcat and would prefer an error rather than a useable output
I can imagine that someone would find a program like this to be useful, and depends on the presently common behavior of
zcat, so I expect this is an important part of a system used by a corporation I interact with (and probably many more than I’d expect):if zcat ./file.txt.gz >/dev/null then process_file ./file.txt.gz else printf '%s\n' "There was a decimal exit status of ${?}" fiA failure to understand whether something is useful is not a good reason to change it.