On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe
<[email protected]> 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.
- shells 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.
