Not a bug but not ideal – Redirection

I wanted to see exactly what control codes something was outputting to the VDU, so I thought I’d be terribly clever and write:

*Thingy { > vdu: }

The SystemDevice vdu: is quite useful here because it GST-encodes any control codes, displaying |G instead of beeping, for example. So that command should give a nice display of exactly what is output.

Except of course it doesn’t. It ought to, but it doesn’t.

This is because the redirection also applies to vdu: so goes recursive, and the Kernel’s redirection does not guard against recursion.

I’ve modded my OS to avoid recursion around the redirection BPut, but I can’t definitively state that the absence of said protection is a bug.

Whether text output by a filing system should be subject to redirection back to the same filing system is debatable in general, but in the case of [raw]vdu: would seem to be counterproductive.