Add ability to read from file or files in addition to stdin

[ErikSwan]

This seems like a minor thing, but it would be helpful to have the ability to read from one or more files passed as command line options instead of standard input.

This could save some keystrokes especially in the case of reading from multiple files, where instead of cat /foo/bar/* | distribution you can do distribution /foo/bar/*.

[analou-cone]

Perhaps you could submit a patch?

[bradfordboyle]

When reading multiple files, would there be one histogram? Or one per file?

[analou-cone]

One histogram only. To get multiple histograms, wrap calls to distribution in a loop like...

for i in $( ls filetype.* ) ; do
  distribution $i
done

[bradfordboyle]

You can already do this with one extra character, using shell redirection:

cat<<EOF > file-1.txt
a 1
b 2
c 3
EOF

cat<<EOF > file-2.txt
e 4
f 5
g 6
EOF

distribution --graph=kv < file*

[ErikSwan]

@analou-cone I would be happy to submit a patch; hopefully I can find some time to do so in the next month or so. Just wanted to submit an issue so I wouldn't forget about the idea, and in case anyone else had the time to develop it before I did.

@bradfordboyle I realize it can already be done this way, but most command line tools that take input can usually accept it from either standard input or a file passed as a command line argument. The thinking was to have distribution behave this way as well so it works out of the box as most people would expect.