I've been following most of the discussion on this, and although I happen to use "alias ls='ls -aF'" as part of my .profile under ksh here at work, I also hasten to point out that it's about the only alias that I do use. Yes, it's possible to concoct (or copy) huge long lists of aliases from others, including bearded gurus, and yes, in my early days, I used a .cshrc that consisted of maybe 2 or 3 entries that I happened to understand (as opposed to the remaining several dozen that I still don't).
But, yes, Murphy is alive and well, and always hanging around my system. So, my root shell's .profile includes a 'PS1="N1HO ROOT> "; export PS1' stanza to gently remind me that the safety is off on the 10 gauge pointed at my <foot>. And, yes, it's probably a good thing to check and double-check and TEST OFFLINE if at all possible. We had a customer who decided one night to add an "enhancement" to their backup scripts (under Tru64, not Linux, but...) which would delete the newly-depracated logfiles when the backup was complete. They used that famous Murphy-ism of "rm *", assuming (very rashly, of course) that they were somewhere down in /var/log/ nightly/this/that/other/subdirectory. However, when the script was run for the first time, something else had gone wrong and there was no /var/log....<mumble>/other subdirectory. So, the script bounced back up to... you guessed it... /. We gently suggested that they test the output of 'pwd' next time, after they recovered their system and its database... The point is, of course, that assumptions can be rash, particularly involving aliases, environmental variables, and initial vs. desired location in the directory tree, and should always be carefully checked. Cheers, Bayard ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
