Thanks for the tip (and I think I might actually have it written down in a file somewhere), but this is missing the point. I shouldn't have to do this -- it should be automatic. Why? Because it's required for so many different tasks. For example: Source maps in the web world.

EDIT: ... and it's actually possibly(!) even worse in the web world where you often have a ridiculous number of levels to your "transformation". Personally, I have never got "bower (source) -> grunt -> ts/(scala.js+closure) -> babel -> es5" (with source maps) to ever work even semi-reliably.

(I know we have too many things in this pipeline, but it's what we have to deal with.)

I was actually waiting for your reply saying that I had missed the point :-). I think that automatic line numbering (as an example) misses the point of the UNIX tool philosophy, namely composability. It would seem that the designers of grep and nl thought those were separate tasks. The point of the CLI is that you can make the simple building blocks do whatever you want, for any workflow. You can always make an alias for grep that does numbering by default.

Basically, however widespread our personal workflows are, there are vastly more workflows we havent't even thought of that are essential to someone else's livelihood, for whom automatic numbering (or whatever) would ruin everything.

As for source maps, yeah, that's got room for improvement.

> I was actually waiting for your reply saying that I had missed the point :-).

Hah!

EDIT: I had a really complicated thing here, but decided to delete it... because I don't think anyone understands any of this "computers" thing properly, including me. Hope you understand :).

EDIT#2: Is there a "flowers for you" emoticon?