unix

On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe first.lord.of.teal@gmail.com wrote:

Quoth Lee Fallat on Sat, Apr 25 2015 21:57 -0400:

The UNIX Hater's Handbook. A great perspective on UNIX.

In what way? I remember a chapter-length rant about rm(1) being broken because it actually removed things and some (accurate) complaints about X; otherwise, Dennis Ritchie's preface seemed like the best part.

hells interpret '*' and other globs:     * If programs does not interprets theses globs themselves, they cannot       do additional checks, e.g. rm cannot check * to avoid potential dangerous actions. * If programs interprets these globs themselves, like git or hg, then shells' interpretation is redundant.

• Special characters like spaces, tabs, new lines are valid in file names, but shells are unhappy with them.

• Different UNIX ship different commands. Nowadays things are much better, but this problem still exist, mostly between bsd(darwin) and linux.

• Data passes through programs as strings. Sender need to encode and receiver need to decode. What makes things worse is there are no common standard strings format for interoperation.