[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Even more unix holy war. Was "Clinton freezes U.S. assets .."



And did I mention that in DOS you can type:
   dir filename /s
if you suspect that filename is in a subdirectory somewhere
and you want the computer to find it for you, 

but in unix you type:
   find . -name filename -print

but the entertaining thing is that if you type
   find . -name filename

find then merrily goes forth, searches for the file -- which
takes an extraordinarily long time, much longer than on
my DOS machine, and then, cheerfully throws away what it
has found, no warnings, no error message, no explanation.

find thinks to itself "Gee, the user asked me to find the 
file, but he did not tell me to do anything with the
information, so, I guess he just wanted me to exercise
the network and the hard drive for five minutes or so."

And did I mention "curses"

You are spared.  I will not mention "curses".

And did I mention SUID.

Well fortunately SUID has already been mentioned 
by other folk in the "Clinton freezes .." thread.

And did I mention that unix has no less than seven families
of metasyntactic operators, each of them different from 
and clashing with the others, that these families follow
no logical order of substitution that I can figure out.

Yeah, I know, that is what makes the unix shell so powerful.

It is remarkably similar to what makes a chainsaw so powerful.

It is very good at cutting your fingers off.

And once again, I wish to remind you that the unix "make"
utility used to treat spaces as semanticly different
from tabs.


 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
                                          |  
We have the right to defend ourselves     |   http://www.catalog.com/jamesd/
and our property, because of the kind     |  
of animals that we are. True law          |   James A. Donald
derives from this right, not from the     |  
arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.  |   [email protected]