begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 02:01:14PM -0700: > kelsey hudson wrote: > >Lan Barnes wrote: > > > >><grumble> but whatever happened to the *nix tradition of "return silently > >>on success"? > > > >Blame windows. > > No, blame UNIX. UNIX is the wrong one is this instance.
Well, in the days when printer/terminals were common, and bandwidth was low, not so much. These days, when bandwidth is high, and we look at phosphors all day... yeah. > In human-computer interaction, anything which takes longer than .1 > seconds causes the human brain to notice. At that point, status becomes > a necessity. "Trust the Computer. The Computer Is Your Friend. You Trust the Computer, don't you, Citizen?" > Second, if you know any semi-old school sysadmins, you will realize that > UNIX on workstations was never silent. > > Hands up. How many sysadmins are still uncomfortable that they can't > hear their hard drives rattle anymore? sync <rattle> sync <silence> /me raises hand > That hard drive rattle was the progress meter. Blinkenlights Our Our Friends. ... On this system, I'm running xdaliclock, an xload-style widget, and a network monitoring widget. I'm thinking that the ever-changing output is a sort of status indicator that the system isn't hung or overloaded, and thus I have a warm fuzzy. Truth be told, a number of scripts I write to automate tasks have some sort of progress meter. They "echo -n '.'", or print out filenames, or manage some sort of spinner. Most of the scripts that *don't* do this are the ones that take less than five seconds or so to complete, and even those sometimes get a -v (for verbose) flag. -- There's truth in them thar hills. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
