1995-01-27 - Even more unix holy war. Was “Clinton freezes U.S. assets ..”

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From: jamesd@com.informix.com
To: N/A
Message Hash: 14d09fb1cd0413030baff7a0619454b42280c9e5805b67b37238852d1d177d7d
Message ID: <9501270538.AA00359@carbon.informix.com>
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UTC Datetime: 1995-01-27 05:38:06 UTC
Raw Date: Thu, 26 Jan 95 21:38:06 PST

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From: jamesd@com.informix.com
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 95 21:38:06 PST
Subject: Even more unix holy war. Was "Clinton freezes U.S. assets .."
Message-ID: <9501270538.AA00359@carbon.informix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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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.


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